But here we meet with a fresh crop of difficulties in the theory of
the comic. Such a proposition as the following: "My usual dress
forms part of my body" is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet
imagination looks upon it as true. "A red nose is a painted nose,"
"A negro is a white man in disguise," are also absurd to the reason
which rationalises; but they are gospel truths to pure imagination.
So there is a logic of the imagination which is not the logic of
reason, one which at times is even opposed to the latter,--with
which, however, philosophy must reckon, not only in the study of the
comic, but in every other investigation of the same kind. It is
something like the logic of dreams, though of dreams that have not
been left to the whim of individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt
by the whole of society. In order to reconstruct this hidden logic,
a special kind of effort is needed, by which the outer crust of
carefully stratified judgments and firmly established ideas will be
lifted, and we shall behold in the depths of our mind, like a sheet
of subterranean water, the flow of an unbroken stream of images
which pass from one into another. This interpenetration of images
does not come about by chance. It obeys laws, or rather habits,
which hold the same relation to imagination that logic does to
thought.

Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case
in hand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is
also comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic,
not only that of a man, but that of society also, and even the
disguise of nature.

Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped,