of the principal means of holding in line the members of the various warlike organizations which flourish in these tribes. A man of one of these societies who resents the abduction of his wife by a fellowmember, this being no violation of the rules of his order, is laughed at by the other members of the organization until his resentment passes.

Let these examples suffice. They show that laughter is a means of expressing and maintaining the group standard. It reminds people of their place in the social group and is an efficient, if gentle, reminder that they had better keep where they belong. It is an expression of the proprieties of the occasion to which the individual must attend.

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When a person laughs at himself, he is, in the main, assuming the group standard, applying to himself the standards which the group applies to him. He assumes in his own person the duties of policing his conduct.

Little wonder, then, that the group should regard with serious concern the individual who is lacking in the faculty of laughter. He is largely on a par with the man who can not render military service to the group, who can not serve his fellows in the very important enterprise of bringing into effective use that group standard which makes for unity, though for unity at the price of uniformity. He may be amenable to group standards, but he is useless in the important task of holding others to that standard.

Laughter, it follows, is individually as well as socially selfpreservative. The laughter of the virtuous man is not that of the vicious, for the virtuous and the vicious belong to different groups and are maintaining different standards. There is no equality in which there is no equality of laughter, no democracy in which there is no democracy of laughter, no shifting of standards unless there is a shifting in the things which elicit laughter.

There are, of course, marked intellectual elements in laughter. The individual may laugh at the group and at their laughter. Whether he does so depends upon his appreciation of group standards and upon his acceptance of them. His laughter at them expresses this assumed superiority over them.

Perhaps the most frequent intellectual element in the situations. which elicit laughter is recognition of the unusual or of the unexpected. This frequently harks back to appreciation of departure from, or unexpected conformity with, group standards. We suddenly perceive the situation as in keeping with, or as out of keeping with, the social program, as a neat way of humiliating the haughty, subduing the insubordinate, or thwarting an unexpected departure from social routine. The intellectual element is largely social.

A like-minded social reference tints the psychological elements accompanying laughter. The experience is usually pleasurable, though this is conditioned by the extent to which our laughter is taken up by others who are present, that is, by the extent to which it is appreciated by the group. To laugh when no one laughs with you may be painful.

Laughter is not always elicited by the pleasurable, nor is it always the expression of pleasure. It may be a means of expressing displeasure at personal pretensions. We may laugh in spite of ourselves, though to the spite of another, and to our shame and remorse, ashamed and sorry even while we laugh. These uncontrollable outbursts show the extent to which we are held in the grip of the group standard, and the extent to which we enjoy our assumed superiority.

This sense of elation upon the part of the laugher is almost always present. It is not the mechanism of the man who stumbles or fumbles which arouses our laughter, as Bergson would have us believe; it is rather our elation at our own superiority. If we know that we must immediately pass through a similar test and will do no better than did he, his action is to us not nearly so funny as it would otherwise be. We laugh at the sprightly middle-aged man whose sight and agility should have saved him from the banana peel; but we pity rather than laugh at the aged cripple who had not these aids of discrimination and ready reflexes. Yet the latter action is much more mechanical than the former. It is true we recognize our superiority to the latter, but we do not recognize it in any sense of elation, for we have not placed ourselves on the same plane for comparison. With the middle-aged man who is like unto us it is different: he indiscreetly does what our discretion would not permit us to do. The behavior of the feeble-minded elicits no laughter from those who have a lively sense of what feeble-mindedness means; but these same actions may elicit laughter from those who do not know that the performer is feeble-minded, or for whom this information conveys no real knowledge of his condition. We laugh, in fact, not so much at the act as at the person performing the act. This is as true of the situation on the stage as of those in daily life, when alone as when in a group. Pascal asked: Why do we laugh at a fool, but do not laugh at the cripple? and answered: The one is crippled in mind, but does not know it; the other is crippled in body, but knows it. But, as was mentioned, if he is a congenital mental cripple, we do not laugh at him; it is only because he ought to know better that we laugh at him, never because he can not know better. Now laughter, like any other social tendency, easily overflows

the channels of its social usefulness and may become a social calamity rather than a social blessing. We often find it purposeless rather than purposive, controverting rather than supporting the principles which we have laid down. This may call for a more careful orientation but does not contradict our explanation of origin and function. As you can not disprove the physiological utility of hunger and appetite by pointing to dyspepsia, nor the use of language by pointing to solecism, so you can not disprove the use of laughter by pointing to its misuse.

If the above explanation of laughter arouses the laughter of the critic who reads these pages, his hilariousness will prove my point, for it will be an expression of his intellectual disapproval and of his personal elation of superiority; and if he does not laugh at it, but takes it seriously, I assume that he has discovered in it some elements of truth which may turn the laugh on rival theories.

SOME PROBLEMS OF PROGRESS

By Professor H. M. DADOURIAN

TRINITY COLLEGE

I

ROGRESS is the controlling idea of western civilization. The

PROGRESS

man on the street discusses it as much as the philosopher. The most reactionary claims it no less than the radical. It has its place in the campaign material of the politician and comes into the exhortations of the preacher. In fact it is the most widely accepted doctrine of the present day. Yet the state of progress is an accomplished fact only in one of the great divisions of human activity, that is, in science. In the fields of economics and government, for instance, it is only a hope and an expectation. I am not using the term progress in the sense of a sequence of events, not as the state implied by "we don't know where we are going, but we are on our way." I am using it to denote a state of continuous advance with ever increasing rapidity toward an ideal yet definite goal.

The state of change in the field of government or of economics can not be called progressive in the above sense of the term. Great changes have taken place in these fields during the last 150 years, but their character has been impulsive and intermittent, accompanied with backward and forward oscillations. The political history of France from the revolution to the present day is a case in point. Even the history of this country during the same period is no exception. Although reactions comparable with those in France have not occurred in this country, it must be admitted that two of the three great steps towards an ideal of democracy were the result of revolution and of war. The third great step, the extension of suffrage to women, was accomplished by peaceful means, but as a setback we have the constant weakening of the actual if not the theoretical power of the citizen as a voter, which has been going on during the last one hundred years as a result of superficial expansion of democracy without commensurate growth in depth. The lack of simultaneous development of democracy along other lines-principally along economic lines-has introduced into the body politic forces and machinery which have made the franchise as meaningless to the average citizen as the right of a small stockholder to vote in the affairs of a large stock company. The

extension of Hobson's choice by our two-party system is counterbalanced, it is needless to say, by the practical identity of the aims and methods of the major parties.

If we consider any actual event as a necessary and inevitable link in the chain of history, then the present is in advance of the past whatever the character of the present state. Even a long swing backward along the road is a forward stretch if it is unavoidable. If we do not take this fatalistic view, however, it becomes debatable whether we have advanced far, if at all, during the last hundred years in the totality of our theory and practice of democracy, social and economic, as well as political.

The intermittent method of advance in the fields of economics and politics has, in the past, been destructive of wealth, of human lives, of happiness. It has given rise to suppression, revolution and war. It has aroused intense hatred between classes and races. It has produced the misery of filthy slums, on the one hand, and the debauchery of irresponsible wealth, on the other. If this method has been ruinous in the past, it may become fatal, at least to western civilization, if persisted in in the future. This is the supreme lesson to be learned from the last war and from the developments of instruments of destruction. Western civilization is at the parting of the way. It may follow its predecessors in the path of destruction or it may strike out into the new path blazed by science.

The idea of progress is less than three centuries old. It did not become a generally accepted principle until after the middle of the nineteenth century, and even then only in the western world. Its late appearance in the history of civilization is due to the world-wide misconceptions, incompatible with the idea of progress, which prevailed in the past with regard to the origin and destiny of the human race and of its habitat. The Ancient Greeks believed in the cycle theory of civilization. History repeated itself in a series of cycles. Nothing was, or could be, new under the sun. On the other hand, the Christians have followed the Hebrews and earlier oriental peoples in believing in the initial degeneration theory, according to which man and his world were created perfect only a few thousand years ago, but on account of "man's first disobedience" and fall his race and his world were condemned to a relatively short and miserable existence and to a final destruction, except for a chosen few who were to be saved from the wreckage of mankind.

There is no room for the idea of progress in either of these theories. Therefore a reasonable doubt as to their validity was necessary for the birth of the idea, and a more or less complete