we are inclined to lay stress on the sentence as exceptionally witty.
Lichtenberg’s witticisms are above all remarkable for their thought-content and their certainty of hitting the mark. Goethe has rightly remarked about this author that his witty and jocose thoughts positively conceal problems. Or perhaps it may be more correct to say that they touch upon the solutions of problems. When, for example, he presents as a witty thought:
“He always read Agamemnon instead of the German word angenommen, so thoroughly had he read Homer” (technically this is absurdity plus sound similarity of words). Thus he discovered nothing less than the secret of mistakes in reading.[1] The following joke, whose technique (p. 78) seemed to us quite unsatisfactory, is of a similar nature.
“He was surprised that there were two holes cut in the pelts of cats just where the eyes were located.” The stupidity here exhibited is only seemingly so; in reality this ingenuous remark conceals the great problem of teleology in the structure of animals; it is not at all so self-evident that the eyelid cleft opens just where the cornea
- ↑ Cf. my Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by A. A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London.
