Play, too, furnishes a similar distraction from the commonplace world, and after this inquiry we are able to understand why it is persisted in to the point of exhaustion. Especially is this the case with children, who more readily and completely lose themselves in present enjoyment.[652] Every one who has had much to do with these little people will recall with feelings of not unmixed pleasure how everlastingly the small tyrants insist on hearing the same story over and over, and playing the same games. Fighting and movement games are invariably begun again as soon as the children can get their breath, and some kinds of experimentation are even more faithfully repeated. “When a child strikes the combination required,” says Baldwin, “he is never tired working it. H—— found endless delight in putting the rubber on a pencil and off again, each act being a new stimulus to the eye. This is specially noticeable in children’s early efforts at speech. They react all wrong when they first attack a new word, but gradually get it moderately well, and then sound it over and over in endless monotony.”[653]
This impulse toward repetition is doubtless the physiological reason for carrying on play to the utmost limit of strength. The second point to be noticed is the trance-like state resulting from such repetition of some movements, and sometimes with the added influence of rhythm.[654] The child who leaps and hops about or runs with all his might, or scuffles with his companions, is seized with a wild impulse for destruction; the skater and bicyclist, the swimmer sporting in the waves, and, above all, the dancer, whose movements are adjusted in harmony with the rhythmic repetition of pleasant sounds, are all possessed by a kind of temporary madness which compels them to exert their powers to the utmost. It is not an easy matter to determine the physiological basis of this intoxication of movement. Violent muscular contraction is not an essential, for in such passive motion as coasting, for example, the effect is strong, amounting sometimes to a sort of giddiness. Active motion is, of course, of more interest to us, since, in conjunction with the state of trance, the principle of circular reaction is then operative. Dancing is a kind of play calculated to augment this condition to the verge of the pathological. Read, for example, the description of the arrow dance of the Weddas in Sarasin’s work and compare it with St. John’s picture of the dancing dervishes of Cairo.[655] The harmless magic of play, however, is as different from such mad excesses as is the exhilarating effect of a glass of wine from the frenzy of drunkenness.
We may now sum up: There are two leading principles which must ground a physiological theory of play—namely, the discharge of surplus energy and recreation for exhausted powers. They may operate simultaneously, since acts supplying recreation to exhausted forces may at the same time call into play other powers and thus afford the needed discharge for them. In many cases, and especially in youth, the first principle seems to act alone, while on the other hand play may be solely recreative, without any dependence on a store of surplus energy. Further, it is important to notice two other considerations which throw light on persistence in play to the point of exhaustion. The first is circular reaction, that self-imitation which in the resultant of one’s own activities finds ever anew the model for successive acts and the stimulus to renewed repetition. The second is the trance condition, which so easily ensues from such activity, and which is practically irresistible.
The essential thing seems to be the demonstration of a theory of play entirely from a physiological standpoint, and not involving hereditary impulses. No more comprehensive explanation is known to me, and yet, in looking back over the ground covered, while it must be admitted that we have reached an advantageous point of view, still, on the other hand, the feeling naturally arises that these principles, loosely strung together, as they are, do not include the whole subject. Think of the play of children too young to go to school, for in such spontaneous activity, not yet enriched by invention or tradition, we have the kernel of the whole question. For a series of years we find life virtually controlled by play. Before systematic education begins, the child’s whole existence, except the time devoted to sleeping and eating, is occupied with play, which thus becomes the single, absorbing aim of his life. Can we then be content to apply to a phenomenon so striking as this a physiological principle confessedly inadequate to cover it, although admirably adapted for application to some features of it? Does not its peculiar and inherent nearness to the springs of life and life’s realities demand a complete explanation grounded on a general principle which is applicable at once to youth and to the play which lasts all through life? To answer this question an appeal must be made to the third popular conception of play, for a biological investigation alone can reveal the sources of human impulse.
2. The Biological Standpoint
In considering play from the biological standpoint we find two tasks prepared for us: first, a genetic explanation of play, and second, the appraisal of its biological value. The theory of descent whose scientific formula bears Darwin’s name will be most useful to us in both undertakings. There is a steady and constantly increasing current against his teaching, and the opposition has taken a witty form, if not one dictated by good taste, in the saying that it is high time that biology recovered from its “Englische Krankheit.” I think that this exaggerated depreciation is grounded in the just opinion that Darwinism does not unlock all the secrets of evolution. Scientific theories which explain everything they should explain are comparatively rare, particularly in the sphere of organic life, and I regard it as more than probable that an x and a y still remain to be calculated after Darwin’s principle of evolution has done its best. But whether we shall soon find a better working principle is another question. It may even now be ripe or it may yet linger for centuries; perhaps it may never come in terms of thought now known to us. For the present we have only the choice among metaphysics, Darwinism, and resignation. I, for one, then, regard the cavalier treatment of the Darwinian doctrine as a mistake, and still prefer to test special problems according to its light. Its two fundamental ideas are, first, evolution by means of the inheritance of acquired characters; and, second, evolution by means of survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The essence of the first (Lamarckian) principle is denied by many Darwinians, but, assuming that its influence is as strong as its advocates claim, we should then be forced to hold that the activity of ancestors wrought in the child hereditary predispositions. These ancestors, having made use of their sensory and motor apparatus all through their lives in every possible way, must have fought out many battles, conducted the chase, and connected themselves with social groups. Accordingly, we find in their descendants the impulses to experimentation, to fighting, chasing, hiding, social, and other plays. Schneider believes that the boy’s strong propensity for catching butterflies, beetles, flies, and other insects, as well as that for robbing birds’ nests, is attributable to the fact that his savage ancestors obtained their food supply by such means;[656] and Hudson says, in speaking of heredity in connection with certain bird dances, that if at first the habit had been found of expressing feelings of gladness by means of minuet steps, men as well as birds would be said to have an instinct for dancing the minuet.[657]
It is just along these lines that we may hope to estimate the biological value of play, and subsequently develop it in relation to our own view. But the assumption of the heredity of acquired characters and its wide application introduce a new element. It is difficult to understand, for example, how a habit originates whose physiological basis is confined to the acquisition of specified traits in the nervous system, which in their turn bring about changes in the germ substance of the organism, and appear in the offspring as hereditary paths for the tendency to repeat the same sorts of acts. If such a process is possible at all, it must be in the period of youth, when the organism still possesses great plasticity. Thus A. E. Ormann says, in an appendix to his German translation of Baldwin’s Mental Development: “The last objection [the neo-Darwinistic], that organic structures, such as bones, horns, teeth, etc., are fixed and unmodifiable, I am not prepared to admit. I do not believe that these structures change in adult animals just as I do not believe that bionomic influences can effect important accommodations in them. Yet change and accommodation in these very orders are quite possible in the case of young animals still in the developmental period, and I am convinced that the majority of effective accommodations do originate at this very time, and that the possibility of their appearing diminishes as maturity is approached.”[658] If this should prove to be the fact, play would then have the task of maintaining a countless mass of hereditary impressions important to the preservation of life, and also of supplying a means for individual adaptation of the example of adults which through imitation and direct transmission gradually become hereditary possessions of the race.
But interesting as this point of view is, we find grave reason for doubting its reconcilability with the facts that we have already ascertained. First, there is the questionableness of the inheritance of acquired characters at all. Götter said long ago that common experience is all against it,[659] and Galton, too, is very skeptical in regard to it, if he does not flatly deny the possibility.[660] A. Weismann is, however, its chief opponent, and is therefore regarded as the leader of the neo-Darwinian school. How the inheritance of acquired characters can be entirely excluded from the struggle for existence is yet undemonstrated, but Spengel[661] has recently pointed out a notable series of adaptations which are independent of it. Indeed, in regard to the instincts which chiefly claim our notice, such a competent critic of neo-Darwinism as Romanes[662] is forced to admit that some quite complicated ones have attained perfection without the aid of the Lamarckian principle. These facts warn us not to attach too much weight to it.
Under these circumstances we must attempt an independent basis for our biological theory of play, since, if the Lamarckian principle is ruled out, only natural selection remains of the scientific hypotheses. To this as well just and weighty objections have been raised, and I may mention that selection in the Darwinian sense does not account for the origin of structures which are at first useless, nor how it comes about that the right selection occurs in the right place. To meet these objections Baldwin has advanced his Organic Selection and Weismann his Germinal Selection.[663] According to the former, the inheritance of acquired accommodations is unnecessary, their task being sufficiently accomplished if they keep the creature afloat in its natural environment until selection has time through favouring accidental variations tending in the same direction (coincident variations) to build up hereditary adaptations.[664] Osborn and Lloyd Morgan have reached a similar standpoint independently of Baldwin. Weismann, who in a surprising change of base abandons his former position on the all-sufficiency of Darwin’s individual selection, extends the selective principle to the germ substance, which, in his view, does not consist of similar life-units, but possesses a sort of structure, the elements of which (the “determinants”) already represent the respective parts of the future individual. Each “determinant” struggles for sustenance against its neighbours, so producing a sort of germinal selection, in that the stronger among them has its development furthered at the expense of the weaker, transmits the force so acquired to the offspring, furnishes them in the very beginning of their career with a favourable footing in the struggle for life, and insures further progress in the same direction. Here, then, is the possibility of a specially determined variation grounded in the very existence of the germ substance,[665] and through the interaction of individual and germinal selection much is accomplished which the former could not alone achieve.[666]
The future must finally judge between these rival efforts to improve the old theory. Baldwin’s organic selection, which has now been accepted by Wallace Poulton and others, may possibly be applicable to all cases of adaptation, though it has not yet been so widely developed by its author. The chief value of Weismann’s new hypothesis is perhaps its luminous portrayal of the interaction of individual selection with special developmental tendencies in the germ substance, but the explanation of these tendencies themselves by means of a struggle for sustenance seems to find little confirmation. Here is probably an x, or possibly several unknown values. Yet the important part which selection plays in this exceedingly complicated process should not be underestimated. Nägeli has likened selection to a gardener who cuts away the superfluous growth of a tree, which then by its own inner processes forms its crown. But when we consider, for example, the wonderful mimicry, for whose striking external resemblances “inner” developmental tendencies could hardly suffice (whether with metaphysical hypotheses of pre-established harmony or of unity of will or consciousness), the skill and power of this “gardener” appear to be sufficient.