Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/24

8 in some way are contrasted with each other, usually through the medium of speech association.” For a critic like Lipps it would not be difficult to reveal the utter inadequacy of this formula, but he himself does not exclude the element of contrast—he merely assigns it elsewhere. “The contrast remains, but is not formed in a manner to show the ideas connected with the words, rather it shows the contrast or contradiction in the meaning and lack of meaning of the words” (p. 87). Examples show the better understanding of the latter. “A contrast arises first through the fact that we adjudge a meaning to its words which after all we cannot ascribe to them.” In the further development of this last condition the antithesis of “sense in nonsense” becomes obvious. “What we accept one moment as senseful we later perceive as perfect nonsense. Thereby arises, in this case, the operation of the comic element” (p. 85). “A saying appears witty when we ascribe to it a meaning through psychological necessity and, while so doing, retract it. It may thus have many meanings. We lend a meaning to an expression knowing that logically it does not belong to it. We find in it a truth, however, which later we fail to find because it is foreign to our laws of experience or usual modes of thinking. We endow it with a