Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work should not be taught. Education perhaps should really begin with directing childish sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. Says Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it." Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers" in our times in merry old England[22] every one played games; and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tons, age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as laborari, [To labor] so ludere, et joculari orare sunt. [To play and to jest are to pray] Laughter itself, as Kühne long ago showed, is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their tension.[23]
The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived, for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play. Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if overtense, result in "hysterical convulsions." It is also the best form of self-expression; and its advantage is variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals. The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly systematised into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and recreation.
The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering effort, for In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister [The master shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Können, a separation which the Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism.
The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens. Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion. National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psychologist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred reformers."
[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American
Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]
[Footnote 2: The Influence of Exercise upon Growth by Frederic Burk. American Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 340-349.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A.C. Ellis.
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.]
[Footnote 4: Studies in Imagination, by Lilian H. Chalmers.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.]
[Footnote 5: Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popular
Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 703-805.]
[Footnote 6: Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical
Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.]