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matrices
with fixed codes -- from those which govern the breathing of his cells,
to those which determine the pattern of his signature, constitute that
creature of many-layered habits whom we call John Brown. When the Duke
of Wellington was asked whether he agreed that habit was man's second
nature he exclaimed: 'Second nature? It's ten times nature!'

Habits have varying degrees of flexibility; if often repeated under
unchanging conditions, in a monotonous environment, they tend to
become rigid and automarized. But even an elastic strait-jacket is
still a strait-jacket if the patient has no possibility of getting out
of it. Behaviourism, the dominant school in contemporary psychology, is
inclined to take a view of man which reduces him to the station of that
patient, and the human condition to that of a conditioned automaton. I
believe that view to be depressingly true up to a point. The argument
of this book starts at the point where, I believe, it ceases to be true.

There are two ways of escaping our more or less automatized routines
of thinking and behaving. The first, of course, is the plunge into
dreaming or dream-like states, when the codes of rational thinking are
suspended. The other way is also an escape -- from boredom, stagnation,
intellectual predicaments, and emotional frustration -- but an escape
in the opposite direction; it is signalled by the spontaneous flash of
insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and
elicits a new response to it. The bisociative act connects previously
unconnected matrices of experience; it makes us 'understand what it is to
be awake, to be living on several planes at once' (to quote T. S. Eliot,
somewhat out of context).

The first way of escape is a regression to earlier, more primitive levels
of ideation, exemplified in the language of the dream; the second an
ascent to a new, more complex level of mental evolution. Though seemingly
opposed, the two processes will turn out to he intimately related.

Man and Machine

When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact
with each other the result (as I hope to show) is either a collision ending in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis,
or their confrontation in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative
patterns found in any domain of creative activity are tri-valent:
that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic,
or intellectually challenging effects.

Let me take as a first example 'man' and 'machine'. A favourite trick of
the coarser type of humour is to exploit the contrast between these two
frames of reference (or between the related pair 'mind' and 'matter'). The
dignified schoolmaster lowering himself into a rickety chair and crashing
to the floor is perceived simultaneously in two incompatible contexts:
authority is debunked by gravity. The savage, wistfully addressing the
carved totem figure -- 'Don't be so proud, I know you from a plum-tree' --
expresses the same idea: hubris of mind, earthy materiality of body. The
variations on this theme are inexhaustible: the person slipping on a
banana skin; the sergeant-major attacked by diarrhoea; Hamlet getting
the hiccoughs; soldiers marching like automata; the pedant behaving
like a mechanical robot; the absent-minded don boiling his watch while
clutching the egg, like a machine obeying the wrong switch. Fate keeps
playing practical jokes to deflate the victim's dignity, intellect, or
conceit by demonstrating his dependence on coarse bodily functions and
physical laws -- by degrading him to an automaton. The same purpose is
served by the reverse technique of making artefacts behave like humans:
Punch and Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters,
hats in a gust of wind escaping the pursuer as if with calculated malice.

In Henri Bergson's book on the problem of laughter, this dualism of
subtle mind and inert matter ('the mechanical encrusted on the living')
is made to serve as an