totle uses the word phantasia, he means by it, not the creative faculty, but an image before the mind’s eye. While the Greeks were the most imaginative of peoples, they had not as yet analysed the processes of imagination. And the want of a terminology connected with this subject is felt throughout the ‘Poetic’ of Aristotle.
Poetry consists in imitation, mainly of the actions of men; and there are three great species of it—Epic poetry. Tragedy, and Comedy. Of these three kinds Aristotle undertakes to treat; but the promise is only fulfilled with regard to the two first; the treatise breaks off at the point where a disquisition on Comedy might have been expected. Comedy, according to modern views, would hardly be reckoned to be poetry at all. Aristotle, in stating what Comedy is, gives his famous definition of the “ludicrous.” Tragedy, he says, aims at representing men who are above the average; comedy, men who are below it. But the characters in comedy are not so much morally bad, as ugly. There is a certain pleasure derivable from ugliness, and that is the sense of the ludicrous. “The ludicrous is some fault or blemish not suggesting the idea of pain or death; as, for instance, an ugly twisted face is ludicrous, if there is no idea that the owner of it is in pain.” This saying has been the foundation of all subsequent philosophy of laughter. Elsewhere Aristotle defines the ludicrous as “harmless incongruity.” We laugh from a pleasurable sense of contrast and surprise when a thing is out of place but no serious evil seems likely to result.
