II.—Play
“There are two quite different popular ideas of play,” says Professor Groos, in his admirable work on “The Play of Animals.” “The first is that the animal (or man) begins to play when he feels particularly cheerful, healthy, and strong; the second that the play of young animals serves to fit them for the tasks of later life.” The former view, in which the latter may be included incidentally as a result, is closely associated with the names of Schiller,[123] who suggested it, and of Mr. Herbert Spencer,[124] who developed it. Mr. Wallaschek[125] expresses the conception briefly and clearly when he says, “It is the surplus vigour in more highly developed organisms, exceeding what is required for immediate needs, in which play of all kinds takes its rise, manifesting itself by way of imitation or repetition of all those efforts and exertions which are essential to the maintenance of life.” That surplus vigour is often a condition favouring the manifestation of play is probable enough, and seems to be supported by observation and experience; but that it is likewise a condition favouring the chase, combat, mating, and much of the serious business of animal life seems equally unquestionable. Success in all these matters is largely determined by overflowing energy. In play, however, this surplus vigour finds vent when there is no serious occasion for its exercise. But, as Professor Groos says,[126] “while simple overflow of energy explains quite well that the individual who finds himself in a condition of overflowing energy is ready to do something, it does not explain how it happens that all the individuals of a species manifest exactly the specific kind of play expression which prevails with their own species, but differs from every other.” And if to this it be replied, that the specific kind is determined by repetition or imitation of what we have called the serious business of animal life, Professor Groos’s rejoinder is,[127] that “the conception of imitation here set forth—namely, as the repetition of serious activities to which the individual has himself become accustomed—cannot be applied directly to the primary phenomena of play—that is, to its first elementary manifestations” prior to any experience of these serious activities. The repetition (with a difference!) is in such cases not the re-enactment of what has been previously performed in full earnest by the individual, but rather the reappearance in the young of ancestral modes of procedure—in other words, its specific character is such because it is a piece of instinctive behaviour or arises from instinctive proclivities. And this is the central point of the interpretation elaborated with great skill and candour by Professor Groos. Play is instinctive; and its biological value lies in the training it affords for the subsequent earnest of life.
Before leaving the surplus energy theory of play one more point made by Professor Groos may be mentioned. He contends that, though superabundant energy is a favouring condition of animal play (as it is, indeed, of all animal behaviour), still it is not a necessary condition. Animals often play when they are tired out. “Notice a kitten when a piece of paper blows past. Will not any observer confirm the statement that, just as an old cat must be tired to death or else already filled to satiety if it does not try to seize a mouse running near it, so will the kitten, too, spring after the moving object, even if it has been exercising for hours and its superfluous energies are entirely disposed of? Or observe the play of young dogs when two of them have raced about the garden until they are forced to stop from sheer fatigue, and they lie on the ground panting, with tongues hanging out. Now one of them gets up, glances at his companion, and the irresistible power of his innate longing for the fray seizes him again. He approaches the other, sniffs lazily about him, and, though he is evidently only half inclined to obey the powerful impulse, attempts to seize his leg. The one provoked yawns, and in a slow, tired kind of way puts himself on the defensive; but gradually instinct conquers fatigue on him too, and in a few minutes both are tearing madly about in furious rivalry until want of breath puts an end to the game. And so it goes on with endless repetition, until we get the impression that the dog waits only long enough to collect the needed strength, not till superfluous energy urges him to activity.”[128]
Coming now to Professor Groos’s interpretation of play, we find in it, perhaps for the first time in the literature of the subject, adequate stress laid on its biological value. “The play of young animals,” he says,[129] “has its origin in the fact that certain very important instincts appear at a time when the animal does not seriously need them.... Its utility consists in the practice and exercise it affords for some of the more important duties of life, inasmuch as selection [in the higher animals] tends to weaken the blind force of instinct, and aids more and more the development of independent intelligence as a substitute for it. At the moment when intelligence is sufficiently evolved to be more useful in the struggle for existence than the most perfect instinct, then will selection favour those individuals in whom the instincts in question appear earlier and in less elaborated forms—in forms that are merely for practice and exercise,—that is to say, it will favour those animals which play.... Animals cannot be said to play because they are young and frolicsome, but rather they have a period of youth in order to play; for only by so doing can they supplement the insufficient hereditary endowment with individual experience, in view of the coming tasks of life.”
Some stress is here laid on the fact that important instincts appear at a time when the animal does not seriously need them. It seems to imply the doctrine of what biologists term “acceleration”—which means the development of an organ or mode of behaviour at an earlier period in the descendants than that at which it appeared in the ancestors. Thus the adult fighting or hunting instinct of past generations appears in the young to-day as a fighting-play or a hunting-play. It is open to question, however, whether either the instinctive behaviour or the conscious situation in the one case and the other is so nearly identical that the playful fight or hunt can fairly be called the same instinctive procedure as the serious combat or chase. We may hold, with Professor Groos, that the one is an invaluable preparation for the other without identifying them as the same behaviour under different conditions. Indeed the conditions are so different that the identification seems strained. The question may be left open, however, without impairing the value of Professor Groos’s suggestion. And we may divide the preparatory behaviour in what is commonly called play under two heads: first, general preparation for varied modes of serious effort in after-life; and secondly, special preparation for particular forms of this after-effort. Under the first will fall what Professor Groos terms experimentation and movement play, including what Dr. Stout, who fully realizes its importance, calls “manipulation”;[130] under the second, such forms as hunting-play and fighting-play.
Nothing is more characteristic of the young of intelligent animals than the variety and persistency of their behaviour, their sensitiveness to stimuli of many different kinds, their restlessness of swiftly changing attention and response, with occasional pauses of continued effort in some special direction. Constantly on the alert, they exhibit in all its shifting phases behaviour which we interpret as indicating curiosity, inquisitiveness, love of mischief, destructiveness, and so forth. The facts are so familiar to every observer of young animals that it is unnecessary to give any detailed illustration. Watch a kitten in this stage of its development and carefully note its behaviour during half an hour; the variety of effort, the rôles played by trial, failure, and success, the gain of skill and control over behaviour, will at once be evident. Or devote an equal space of time to observing young jays, magpies, or jackdaws. Every projecting piece of wire or bit of wood in their cage is pulled at this way and that way, from above, from below, from the side. Now one, then another, loose object is picked up and dropped, turned over, carried about, pulled at, hammered at, stuffed into this corner and into that, and experimented with in all possible ways. Then the wise bird goes to sleep, and wakes up again only to resume with new zest its persistent and varied efforts, by which it becomes acquainted with all the details of its environment. Watch young birds on the wing gaining their mastery of the air in flight, young seals tumbling in the water, young foals scampering and kicking up their heels in the meadows. A little observation, as occasion serves, a little attention to the progress towards an adequate experience of the meaning of things, towards more complete control, and increased nicety of behaviour, whether in reference to their surroundings, or in powers of finished locomotion, will serve to bring home what Professor Groos includes under experimentation and movement plays. He regards it all as play, since it seems to have no serious end, and is just a preparation for the sterner realities of adult life. And for human beings, whose work is so largely enforced, the freedom and evident joy of it all suggests the play which has acquired for us the meaning of relaxation from irksome effort, and glad abandonment to less constrained modes of behaviour. But in young animals such play is, after all, the serious business of their time of life. Its import for their future welfare can scarcely be overestimated.
And its import is in large degree psychological. If we watch a young puppy or kitten learning gradually to deal effectively with some difficulty in its extending environment, we see that it puts forth its efforts at first in a somewhat random and indefinite fashion. It is one of those animals in which intelligence has been evolved to supersede and become the more plastic substitute for instinct. The random and indefinite movements, are in detail reflex responses to stimuli. But whereas, in a piece of highly elaborated instinctive behaviour, such reflexes are grouped into a whole which is co-ordinated through inherited nervous mechanism; in the case of the acts of the puppy or kitten they have to be further co-ordinated, or more elaborately grouped, through experience. To act in one way some of the reflexes have to be checked as redundant and not to the point: to act in another way other reflexes have to be similarly checked; and in a third way, yet others. But in all three some of the reflexes are utilized to different ends. Many conscious situations contain common elements; and this tends to give unity to the developing experience. But they contain also elements and groupings which afford that diversity without which conscious behaviour could not be accommodated to them. So that we have here the conditions under which what is technically termed “the concomitant differentiation and integration of experience” can proceed.
And if we speak of the instinct of experimentation we must remember that what we are dealing with is rather an innate tendency or instinctive propensity than a definite and relatively clean-cut piece of instinctive behaviour. It comprises a great number of inherited reflex acts, and may perhaps be fairly called instinctive in detail. But experimentation must be regarded rather as the proximate end of a conative tendency, or group of conative tendencies, whose ultimate biological end is success in dealing with the environment in the sterner struggle for existence during adult life. The tendency is inherited, and therefore falls under the head of instinctive propensity. But “experimentation” is a group-term under which we comprise the general drift of varied modes of behaviour, founded indeed on a congenital basis, but receiving its stamp and character from what is acquired in the course of the experience it provides. It is essentially a process whereby the conscious situations acquire what Dr. Stout terms meaning; and is specially interesting as affording an example of the way in which intelligence moulds and refashions a number of disconnected reflex responses. And if, following Professor Groos, we call it play, it is a little difficult to see how it can be brought in line with his statement[131] that “the play of youth depends on the fact that certain instincts, especially useful in preserving the species, appear before the animal seriously needs them.” Does experimentation occur before it is needed in the economy of animal behaviour? And might we not with equal truth say that the play of youth depends on the fact that certain acquired habits, especially useful in preserving the species, are gained before the animal seriously needs them?
Passing now to those forms of play which afford more special preparation for particular forms of after-effort, under which fall such types as hunting-play and fighting-play, we may refer the reader to the copious examples so carefully collected by Professor Groos. The way in which a kitten pats a cork or a ball, making it roll and then pouncing upon it, is a characteristic example of animal play. Valuable as a preparation for dealing successfully with a mouse when occasion shall arise, this is a specialized form of experimentation; and it is more obviously in line with the hunting-behaviour of later life than is general experimentation with any particular modes of future behaviour. Still it is essentially experimentation, with the instinctive propensity setting in more definite channels. Its value lies in the acquisition of skill under circumstances easier than those presented in the serious chase. So, too, in the case of the playful tussles of puppies or in that of the kitten, which not only shows playful fight to its brothers and sisters, but also to its mother, who responds by holding down the struggling and scratching little creature. Unquestionably, there is an instinctive propensity; much of the detail, and some of the grouping, exhibit inherited reflexes due to special modes of stimulation. No doubt many of these responses occur in a similar but more emphatic way in a serious fight, and yet we may hesitate before committing ourselves to the theory of acceleration. It is at least equally probable that play as preparatory behaviour differs in biological detail (as it almost certainly does in emotional attributes) from the earnest of after-life, and that it was evolved directly as a preparation, as a means of experimentation through which certain essential modes of skill were acquired,—those animals in which the preparatory play propensity was not inherited in due force and requisite amount being worsted in the combats of later life, and eliminated in the struggle for existence. For, in the preparatory tussles and squabbles and playful fights of young animals, experience is gained without serious risk to life and limb.
The modifications of Professor Groos’s biological interpretation of play which we would suggest are so slight that we may be said to accept it almost unreservedly. The play of youth, we may urge, depends on instinctive propensities to experimentation in varied ways, some of more general and others of more special import; and the value of such experimentation lies in the fact that it is a means of acquiring, under circumstances more easy and less dangerous than those of sterner life, experience and skill for future use. In a word, play depends on instinctive propensities of value in education.
Passing now to a brief consideration of the feelings and emotions which we may suppose to accompany play, we may place first those which characterize, from this point of view, general experimentation. We have here rapidly varying situations charged with conative impulse, the satisfaction of which must bring pleasure—the occasional thwarting of which is probably toned with the opposite—the latter serving, through contrast, to enhance the satisfaction of ultimate success. Both pleasure and its antithetical state of feeling are primarily matters of the conscious situation as a whole, and even in ourselves are difficult to distribute in analysis. But assuredly no small share of the total product must be assigned to the successful behaviour which consummates the conative tendency. Indeed, it is the thwarting of free action which is the source of much of the discomfort of the young. Unimpeded and vigorous behaviour also brings with it secondary effects in organic processes—fuller heart-beat, freer circulation, deeper respiration, better digestion, firmer muscular tone, and so forth—which have a marked effect on the conscious situation, and aid in producing that emotional tone which cannot, perhaps, be named in better terms than “good spirits” and the joy of existence, so forcibly suggested during the free play of youth. On the other hand, there is no more piteous sight than that afforded by the young animal, “cabined, cribbed, confined,” suffering from ennui and depression—all its organic processes sluggish and craving to be quickened into the natural vigour of life, not creeping slowly through the veins, but coursing at full flood.
In the psychological aspect of play Dr. Groos assigns perhaps the first place to pleasure in the possession of power, or, as Preyer phrases it, pleasure in being a cause. We must be careful, however, lest in using such expressions we seem to imply that animals—even quite young animals—are capable of entertaining ideas which belong to a much later stage of mental development. Speaking of “joy in ability or power,” Professor Groos says,[132] “This feeling is first a conscious presentation to ourselves of our personality as it is emphasized by play.... But it is more than this; it is also delight in the control we have over our bodies and over external objects. Experimentation in its simple as well as its more complicated forms is, apart from its effect on physical development, educative in that it helps in the formation of causal associations.... The young bear that plays in the water, the dog that tears a paper into scraps, the ape that delights in producing new and uncouth sounds, the sparrow that exercises its voice, the parrot that smashes his feeding trough—all experience the pleasure in energetic activity, which is, at the same time, joy in being able to accomplish something.” But those who agree with Dr. Stout, as I do without hesitation, in denying personality (save in a very embryonic condition) and the conception of causation to animals in the perceptual stage of mental evolution, though they may find in Dr. Groos’s contention a central core of truth, will be unable fully to accept his manner of presenting it. “Any single train of perceptual activity,”[133] says Dr. Stout, “has internal unity and continuity. But where conscious life is mainly perceptual, the several trains of activity are relatively isolated and disconnected with each other. They do not unite to form a continuous system, such as is implied in the conception of a person. We must deny personality to animals.” To this I would merely add that, even where perceptual continuity in animals reaches its maximum, it is not reflectively grasped as a whole, and the ideal construction of the personal ego is not conceived as antithetical to the impersonal world of objects. With what Dr. Stout says about causality I am in complete agreement. “We must notice,”[134] he urges, “the essential difference which separates the merely perceptual category from that of ideational and conceptual thought. The perceptual category is always purely and immediately practical in its operation. It is a constitutive form of thought only because it is a constitutive form of action. The question ‘Why?’ has no existence for the merely perceptual consciousness. It does not and cannot inquire how it is that a certain cause produces a certain effect. It does not and cannot endeavour to explain, to analyze conditions so as to present a cause as a reason. It does not compare different modes of procedure or different groups of circumstances, so as to contradistinguish the precise points in which they agree from those in which they disagree, and in this way to explain why a certain result should follow in one case and a different result in another case. Causality in this sense can only exist for the ideational consciousness, and the development of the ideational consciousness in this direction is a development of conceptual thinking—of generalization.”
Wherein, then, lies the central core of truth in Professor Groos’s contention? In the satisfaction that arises from the success of any conative activity. We see that the animal striving and doing falls within our conception of a cause, in the scientific sense of the word,—a relatively constant and continuous antecedent of diverse sequent effects. We infer that pleasure accompanies the satisfaction of the multifarious conative impulses. The pleasure is the animal’s; the conception of causality and of self as a continuous person, still the same amid diversity of conscious situations, is ours. If we bear this in mind there can be no objection to our attributing to animals joy in ability or power. It is the pleasure derived from that successful conation whereby animals fall into the category of causes within the scheme of our rational thought.
In fighting-play and hunting-play, too, there arise in more specific forms the pleasures of successful conation with the antithetical feelings accompanying thwarted conation. And these are distinguished from earnest, partly because the companion or the inanimate substitute for prey is the centre of a different situation from that afforded by an enemy or the natural object of the chase; partly by the absence of certain insistent emotional states which characterize earnest and the serious business of life. In fighting, this is anger. And we often see the tendency of this to arise in the midst of fighting-plays, and at once say that it becomes serious and passes into fighting in earnest. Indeed, some tinge of earnest, with its fuller emotional tone, forms part of the preparation for future life, and so far falls within the definition Professor Groos gives of play. From which we may see that play is not easily marked off from other forms of conation.
Brief reference to the element of “make-believe,” which Dr. Groos assigns to the higher forms of play, may be reserved for our fourth section; and some further discussion of its psychological aspect to the concluding chapter.