Excerpt from The Sense of Humor
Although I have tried to make this book enjoyable, and keep it alive to the qualities of its subject, my prevailing purpose has been scientific. So far as the present technique of psychology permits of solutions, I have tried to solve the problem of humorous laughter. And if I have taken one valid step toward that solution, it will please my purpose better than any amount of the success that might be called literary.
The relation between science and the literature of generalities seems to me to be one of the great problems of the future. For science is developing so technical and special a body of knowledge upon every subject under the sun, that only an expert can know anything substantial of what is to be known about it. And yet literary men with no real training in science continue to pretend that they know something, if not everything, about all subjects. They write essays upon general problems with the same free joy of self-expression with which they write stories or poems about particular things or experiences. And these essays, while they may stimulate the reader and give him a fine sense of mental companionship, are very likely to be in flat contradiction to some method or result that scientific men have already humbly and conscientiously verified in which case they certainly belong to the second and not the first order of human values.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Sense of Humor (Classic Reprint) (Max Eastman)