Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/764

 THE GAMING INSTINCT.

ALL classes of society, and the two sexes to about the same degree, are deeply interested in all forms of contest involving skill and chance, especially where the danger or risk is great. Everybody will stop to watch a street fight, and the same per- sons would show an equal interest in a prize-fight or bull-fight, if certain scruples did not stand in the way of their looking on. Our socially developed sympathy and pity may recoil from wit- nessing a scene where physical hurt is the object of the game, but the depth of our interest in the conflict type of activity is attested by the fascination which such a game as football has for the masses, where our instinctive emotional reaction to a conflict situation is gratified to an intense degree by a scene of the conflict pattern.

If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of elation and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to instincts developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates. We can perhaps best get at the meaning of the conflict interest to the organism in terms of the significance to itself of the organism's own movements. Locomotion, of whatever type, is primarily to enable the animal to reach and grasp food, and also to escape other animals bent on finding food. The structure of the organism has been built up gradually through the survival of the most efficient structures. Corre- sponding with a structure mechanically adapted to successful movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the struc- ture itself. The emotional states are, indeed, organic prepara- tions for action, corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat ; and a connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in nature before the development of these types of structure and interest of the conflict

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