Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/28

12 spare inquiring minds the trouble of searching for the desired information in the original sources. However, I do not know whether they will return fully satisfied. For the criteria and attributes of wit mentioned by these authors, such as—activity, the relation of the content of wit to our thoughts, the character of the playful judgment, the union of dissimilarities, contrasting ideas, “sense in nonsense,” the succession of confusion and clearness, the sudden emergence of the hidden, and the peculiar brevity of wit, seem to us, at first glance, so very pertinent and so easily demonstrable by examples that we cannot succumb to the danger of underestimating the value of such ideas. But they are only disjointed fragments which we should like to see welded into an organic whole. In the end they contribute no more to the knowledge of wit than a number of anecdotes teach us of the true characteristics of a personality whose biography interests us. We do not at all understand the connection that is supposed to exist between the individual conditions; for instance, what the brevity of wit may have to do with that side of wit exhibited in the playful judgment; besides we do not know whether wit must satisfy all or only some of these conditions in order to form real wit; which of them may be replaced and which ones are indispensable. We should also like a