Exquisite forms unnumbered follow them, never the same,
Ever the same—who can wait till the end shall be?”
[152] This is the case with our round dances, and is, perhaps, the greatest objection to them.
[153] Die Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 202, 215.
[154] Ibid.
[155] Perhaps the world-wide demand for some sort of intoxicant is another kind of sensory play, since it is calculated to excite and intensify the social feelings. Kruepelin says (Psychiatrie, p. 361) that there is scarcely a single people which does not possess some popular agency for getting rid of the petty cares of life, and that the variety of these poisonous springs of pleasure is surprisingly great. I will note only alcoholism and the morphine habit. Mild intoxication by the former creates in the subject pleasant internal temperature sensations, combined with greater facility in all motor exertion. We become freer, gayer, and braver, and feel that life has no cares or anxieties for us, our strength and ability seem enhanced, and we behave and speak with candour and commonly without caution. The effect of morphine, on the contrary, seems to be rather a pleasant deadening of the motor impulses and a quickening of the intellect and imagination. In Paris there are said to be at least fifty thousand morphine takers, and the manufacture of gold hypodermic syringes of elegant design has become an important branch of the goldsmith’s business. That this intoxication is indulged in like play is shown, by Kraepelin’s statement that in a Russian regiment, to which a young friend of his belonged, nearly all the officers used the syringe. A still more evident play with the social feelings is displayed by many hysterical subjects, who take a certain satisfaction in imagined or real bodily sufferings. These become the central fact in their lives, and are even regarded with a sort of pride as an absorbing topic of conversation (Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, p. 782). These extravagances go to show that men in a normal state also play with their social emotions, even when these are in a way distasteful.
[156] Die Seele des Kindes, pp. 211, 216.
[157] Karl Vierordt, Physiologie des Kindesalters, Gerhardt’s Handbuch der Kinderkrankheiten, vol. i, p. 181.
[158] Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes, p. 139.
[159] Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes. p. 189.