seem excellent and cause loud laughter. But what is it here that produces the difference between wit and naïveté? Apparently it is neither the wording nor the technique, which is the same for both wit and the naïve, but a factor which at first sight seems remote from both. It is simply a question whether we assume that the speakers had the intention of making a witticism or whether we assume that they—the children—wished to draw an earnest conclusion, a conclusion held in good faith though based on uncorrected knowledge. Only the latter case is one of naïveté. It is here that our attention is first called to the mechanism in which the second person places himself into the psychic process of the person who produces the wit.
The investigation of a third example will confirm this opinion. A brother and a sister, the former ten and the latter twelve years old, produce a play of their own composition before an audience of uncles and aunts. The scene represents a hut on the seashore. In the first act the two dramatist-actors, a poor fisherman and his devoted wife, complain about the hard times and the difficulty of getting a livelihood. The man decides to sail over the wide ocean in his boat in order to seek wealth elsewhere, and after a touching farewell the curtain is drawn.
