Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 106.djvu/634

624 We reason for the brute when we interpret its action in this way. I do not suppose that with the anger, or joy, or fear, or love-making, of our brute-neighbors there goes any idea, or mental process, or image whatever; only involuntary impulse stimulated by outward conditions. We ourselves are often happy without thought, scared without reason, angry without volition, and act from spontaneous impulse. I suppose that if man were not a reasonable being he would never laugh, because it is the perception of some sort of incongruity that makes us laugh, though we may not be conscious of it.

Animals never laugh, and probably never experience in any degree the emotion that makes us laugh, because their minds do not perceive incongruities. Such perception is an intellectual act that is beyond them. The incongruous only strikes them as something strange, and excites their suspicion or their fears. When one day I suddenly appeared before my dog in a suit of khaki, a garb in which he had never before seen me, did it excite his mirth, as it did that of some of my neighbors? on the contrary, it alarmed him: he hesitated a moment, showing conflicting emotions, then edged away suspiciously, and when I made a hostile demonstration toward him, fled precipitately in a high state of anger and excitement. Not till I spoke to him in the old tone did he recover himself and approach me in a humiliated, apologetic way.

We are often glad in our sleep, but do we ever dream of laughing? Reason slumbers at such times, and we have no perception of incongruities.

Our anger, our joy, our sex-love, our selfishness, our cruelty, are of animal origin; but our sense of the ludicrous, which is the basis of our wit and humor, our hope, our faith, our feeling of reverence, of altruism, of worship, arc above the animal sphere, as is the faculty of reason. They are of animal origin only in the sense (hat man himself is of animal origin. They are not endowments from some external or extra-human source. They must have been potential in the lower orders, just as our limbs were potential in the fins of the fish, and our lungs potential in its bladder. Evolution must always have something to go upon, but that something may be quite beyond our human ken, as it certainly is in the case of man's higher nature. It is much easier to trace the feather of the bird to the scale of the fish than it is to trace our moral nature to its animal origin. Yet this is the only possible source science can assign to it, because it is the only source that falls within the sphere of physical causation, the only causation science knows.

When the lower animals laugh I shall believe they have the faculty of reason also. Think how long man must have lived before he became a laughing animal—before he was sufficiently developed mentally to take note of incongruities, or for this or that object or incident to excite his mirth instead of his fear! When I first saw a trolley-car running along the street without any apparent means of propulsion, it excited my surprise and curiosity. When my horse first saw it, he was filled with alarm. I do not suppose my horse had the same mental process about it that I had; an effect without an apparent cause could have been nothing to him. He was moved simply by the strangeness of the spectacle. It was a sight the like of which he had never seen before.

Stories are told of monkeys that would seem to indicate in them some perception of the humorous, however rudimentary, but I recall nothing of the kind in the other animals. Of course the impulse of play in animals