Love Quote by William James

James is arguing for laughter as social technology: a fast, embodied shortcut past the moral labor we congratulate ourselves for doing in private. The line flatters neither side. “One hearty laugh” isn’t the polite chuckle of etiquette; it’s an involuntary release that briefly dissolves the hard shell of self-possession. Against it, James sets “hours” of “inward wrestling,” a phrase that sounds heroic until he punctures it with “the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.” He’s skeptical of solitary virtue when it becomes a kind of narcissistic sparring match with your own righteousness.

The subtext is pragmatic in the most Jamesian sense: judge an attitude by its effects. Private attempts at goodwill can stall because they keep the enemy at the center of attention as an object to be managed, corrected, or forgiven. Laughter, especially shared laughter, changes the scene. It creates synchrony: the same breath, the same rhythm, the same moment of being caught off guard. That “communion of heart” is a deliberately quasi-religious phrase, suggesting something sacramental but secularized: a fleeting experience of belonging that bypasses argument.

Contextually, James is writing in a late-19th-century America jittery with ideological battles, religious disputes, and the emerging language of psychology. He’s also part of a broader turn away from moralizing abstractions toward lived experience. The sentence performs what it recommends: it disarms sanctimony with a sly contrast, implying that the shortest distance between two opponents isn’t agreement, but a shared crack in the armor.