on living well. What it now has to dread is that each one of us,
content with paying attention to what affects the essentials of
life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way to the easy
automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear is that
the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an
increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and
more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to
respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a
cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it
insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society
will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of
mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a
slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist
tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round
which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an
eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by
material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion.
It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a
symptom--scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture,
therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this
kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which it inspires, it
restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact
certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into
their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever
the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical
inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of
esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many
particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general
improvement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the
comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed