fourteenth century, we met Chaucer’s physician who knew “the cause of everye maladye, and where engendered and of what humour” and find that Chaucer is not speaking of a mental state at all, but is referring to those physiological humours of which, according to Hippocrates, the human body contained four:  blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, and by which the disposition was determined.  We find, too, that at one time a “humour” meant any animal or plant fluid, and again any kind of moisture.  “The skie hangs full of humour, and I think we shall haue raine,” ran an ancient weather prophet’s prediction.  Which might give rise to some thoughts on the paradoxical subject of dry humor.

Now in part this development is easily traced.  Humor, meaning moisture of any kind, came to have a biological significance and was applied only to plant and animal life.  It was restricted later within purely physiological boundaries and was applied only to those “humours” of the human body that controlled temperament.  From these fluids, determining mental states, the word took on a psychological coloring, but—­by what process of evolution did humor reach its present status!  After all, the scientific method has its weaknesses!

We can, if we wish, define humor in terms of what it is not.  We can draw lines around it and distinguish it from its next of kin, wit.  This indeed has been a favorite pastime with the jugglers of words in all ages.  And many have been the attempts to define humor, to define wit, to describe and differentiate them, to build high fences to keep them apart.

“Wit is abrupt, darting, scornful; it tosses its analogies in your face; humor is slow and shy, insinuating its fun into your heart,” says E. P. Whipple.  “Wit is intellectual, humor is emotional; wit is perception of resemblance, humor of contrast—­of contrast between ideal and fact, theory and practice, promise and performance,” writes another authority.  While yet another points out that “Humor is feeling—­feelings can always bear repetition, while wit, being intellectual, suffers by repetition.”  The truth of this is evident when we remember that we repeat a witty saying that we may enjoy the effect on others, while we retell a humorous story largely for our own enjoyment of it.

Yet it is quite possible that humor ought not to be defined.  It may be one of those intangible substances, like love and beauty, that are indefinable.  It is quite probable that humor should not be explained.  It would be distressing, as some one pointed out, to discover that American humor is based on American dyspepsia.  Yet the philosophers themselves have endeavored to explain it.  Hazlitt held that to understand the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is.  And to apprehend the serious, what better course could be followed than to contemplate the serious—­yes and ludicrous—­findings of the philosophers in their attempts to define humor and to explain laughter.  Consider Hobbes: