Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/477

 ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY. 463 it is further opposed to earnest. Where you have something that is valuable and that matters, you have so far no play, or rather you have no play here except within restraint and limits. For, wherever I am in earnest, my activity is de- fined by an end. And, even if there is no end outside the activity, the control is still present. For where my activity is valuable, its detail is relative to the whole, and its detail is therefore more or less subordinate and subject to restraint. And, so far as I feel this, I lose the sense of mere play and caprice. Play is thus activity spontaneous and agreeable and qualified by the absence of compulsion or earnest. It may be asked if this contrast is really inherent in the sense of play. The opposition to earnest, it may be objected, need exist nowhere except in the spectator's mind. There is natural activity which bursts forth apart from any sense of limit and restraint. Such activity we can find everywhere in the young, and we may even imagine it, if we please, as existing in a perfect mind. And here, it will be said, there is a sense of freedom and of self-assertion and of play; un- coloured by any feeling of contrast or restraint. But the above objection turns, I think, upon a question of words I fully agree that there is such a sense of spontaneous activity, but, apart from a felt contrast, I could not myself call it an experience of play. And at any rate I propose here to use the word otherwise. Where there is play, felt as play, I shall suppose the more or less remote contrast with a more or less withdrawn earnest. I shall assume the presence of a more or less specified sense of something, more or less prominent or in the background, which is felt as control or limit. Restraint, whether as what is forced on me or as what matters, I shall take therefore as a necessary element implied in play. But in what follows I shall con- fine myself to the consideration of play as limited not by force but by earnest. If you ask what is earnest and what matters, then in the end it is life as a whole which matters. Every pleasant activ- ity therefore is so far good, and all matters because and so far as it realises the main end. But on the other hand with- in the contents of this whole there are degrees of necessity ind of importance. In general or in particular, against >mething that either is indispensable or that matters more, some aspect of life may be unimportant. And any aspect which thus relatively does not matter, can be felt here and low not to matter at all. Here is the province of play in its contrast with earnest. Where there is activity which is a whole or in its detail is thus relatively of no moment,