Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/29

16 the play does not stop for refreshment or sleep, until one or the other of the parties have lost all; yet will the play proceed with hilarity and end with a feast and a revelry of intoxication. I have heard that civilized men gamble with the same assiduity.

Hunting and fishing are primeval industries by which wildwood men obtain no small portion of their food. To some extent in civilized society they still remain as industries. In fact, fishing is yet a fundamental industry. But hunting and fishing are now games, and the fruit of the play is called game. Although these activities are often called sports, in science we must call them games, as for success they depend on elements of chance and skill, and the real gamester or sportsman looks with some degree of contempt on the man who hunts or fishes for food.

The fifth group of activital pleasures is that of the fine arts. We have already seen that there is a group arising from a cognition of the pleasures which are derived from metabolism; a second group, called the arts of decoration, which arise from the cognition of the pleasures of form; a third group, called the athletic arts or the arts of sport, which arise from the cognition of the pleasures of force; a fourth group, called the arts of amusement, or games, which arise from the cognition of the pleasures of causation. Here we have a fifth group, which we call psychic arts, or the fine arts, and which arise from the cognition of the pleasures of mind expressed in fine-art works.

In order that we may adequately set forth the nature of the fine arts, it becomes necessary to make a fundamental classification of them.

In a former work we set forth the vicarious nature of the senses of muscular effort—hearing and vision. These are the senses to which appeal is made. These arts have played an important role in the evolution of mankind as demotic bodies, and hence they require more elaborate treatment.