Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/25

 have fully appreciated that sports depend on a superabundance of activity.

The plays of childhood are organized gradually to mimic the activities of elders. Kittens are trained by their mothers to play at catching mice, and puppies are trained by their mothers to play in mimic battle. Puppy wolves play at prowling, and kitten panthers play at fisticuffs. Kids play in racing, and nestling birds play in mimic flight. This universal instinct for play is exhibited in man through many years, in childhood on well into adult life. Athletic sports are universal alike in tribal and in national society. So sports of mimicry gradually develop into sports of rivalry.

Is the pleasure of sports a property of the activity, or is it a quality which depends on the point of view of the person engaged as well as the looker-on? It is within the experience of every normal human being that these pleasures grow and decay; but some are ephemeral and pass away in childhood, others pass away in youth, and still others pass away in adult age, while some undeveloped in childhood scarcely develop in youth, continue and grow in old age. Appealing to history, we discover that ephemeral pleasures become more ephemeral with advancing culture, while others become more intense by demotic development. The antitheses of pleasures, which are pains, pass through a like history in the individual and in the race. In all this field of activital pleasures it is discovered that they become intuitive by inherited experience, and that pleasures and pains alike are such from the point of view. We are therefore justified in affirming that pleasures and pains are qualities derived from natural properties.

This may be a stumbling-block, and hence it requires more elaborate consideration. I refer to the pain produced in the body by injury, as in cutting, tearing, concussion, compression, pinching, the stresses and strains produced by inflammation, the lesions of disease, and all the pains known as physical discomforts. Is the pain in the tooth a quality or a property? Is pain in the head a quality or a property? Is the pain from a bullet wound a quality