the effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to
us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the
absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our
very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-
history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a
man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry.
Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions
gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find
him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are
distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a
definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of
mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE
of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.
Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble
into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you,
it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent
upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was
gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic,
Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of
absentmindedness, which acts as a go-between, you will see this
profound comic element uniting with the most superficial type. Yes,
indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet
so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter by playing on the
same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion the same inner
mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the passer-by
who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall and
simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal who
stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights
to lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in
absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that