Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/476

 462 F. H. BRADLEY : perience of other kinds. And, when we examine its theo- retical claim to possess ultimate truth, we find that this is founded on arbitrariness, is built up in inconsistency, and ends in obscurity. The difference for us between real and unreal is vital. This can hardly consist in a division founded on felt quality condemned for ever to be latent, and, while seeking for another foundation, we found none which is intelligible. Hence this difference, vital for us, must be sought and be discovered elsewhere. It must depend on the internal character of those various worlds which claim our allegiance. And our impassable gulf and our hard and fast division will have to give way to degree and to differ- ences in value. III. I propose now to discuss briefly the meaning of play in its contrast with earnest, and to remark on the mistaken view that play is essentially concerned with the imaginary. The following pages will be found, I hope, still to be more or less concerned with our main subject, since the discussion of these topics will tend once more to break down the divi- sions erroneously forced into life. We shall again discover the mistakes which follow from any attempt to sunder the human world, to divide things from ideas, to identify the real with matter of fact, or to set apart somewhere by itself a superior realm of earnest. (i.) What is play ? It is activity, we may say, so far as that is felt to be unconstrained. 1 And hence the activity must in the first place be pleasant. It must be enjoyed and exercised for its own sake, and, so far as it is mere play, it must not be felt as subject to any sort of control. In play I have nothing which I do or seek because I am forced from the outside, because I am driven by desire, or because there is a valuable end which I pursue and which thus is able to dictate. Play is therefore mere amusement, and, so far as it remains mere play, it owns no master but caprice. In playing I realise myself not only apart from the compulsion of force or appetite, but as free from any- thing that could define and so limit and constrain me. Play is thus incompatible with foreign control, and again 1 The reader will observe that I am not attempting to deal with the subject of play generally. Neither its origin, nor its varieties, nor its position in the whole of animal and human life can be touched on here. And again from the point of view of education I am not offering to say a word. Even if space allowed it, I am not competent to speak on the whole subject, and the reader must be referred to works such as those of Prof. Groos. I am concerned here with the sense of play, and with play as we experience it in contrast with earnest.