Humour resides in the perception of limitation, in discerning how
often the conventional principle is belied by the actual practice.
The old world was full of a youthful sense of its own importance;
it held that all things were created for man--that the flower was
designed to yield him colour and fragrance, that the beast of the
earth was made to give him food and sport. This philosophy was
summed up in the phrase that man was the measure of all things; but
now we have learnt that man is but the most elaborate of created
organisms, and that just as there was a time when man did not
exist, so there may be a time to come when beings infinitely more
elaborate may look back to man as we look back to trilobites--those
strange creatures, like huge wood-lice, that were in their day the
glory and crown of creation. Perhaps our dreams of supremacy and
finality may be in reality the absurdest things in the world for
their pomposity and pretentiousness. Who can say?
But to retrace our steps awhile. It seems that the essence of
humour is a certain perception of incongruity.
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