Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/483

 ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY. 469 Brings me to the point which I wish to discuss. On the one hand I agree that in play we have some sense of limit, but on the other hand I urge the absence in many cases of anything like make-believe. And I will proceed to show the real nature of that restraint which seems everywhere present in play. In many cases of play the restraint, we may say in a word, is not theoretical but moral. Consider the natural sporting of a young dog or a child. There are certain natural activ- ities which in themselves are pleasant. To bite, for in- stance, or to struggle or run is delightful. But, and here is the point, with my playfellow I must not bite beyond a limit. If I go too far and hurt my playfellow the result is unpleasant, unless indeed I am angry and want to fight and am not afraid to do so. Hence I exercise my delightful activities so as to stop short of that result. I need not be thinking of this all the time, but any approach to excess brings on what is discordant with my pleasant condition, both in my own mind and perhaps palpably outside my mind also. Such a result is felt to be incongruous, and, as soon as it is suggested, it suppresses the excess of the activity. If the reader will observe a young dog gnawing the flesh of his hand and watching him to observe if the line is at any time crossed, he will, I think realise my meaning. There is ab- solutely no illusion here but there is restraint, a restraint which later may be formulated as the rule of the game. On the other hand when a dog exercises his activity on a stick, the rule of the game, we may say, is simply that he is not to hurt himself. It may be objected that so far we have not the distinction between play and earnest. But so far, I reply, I am en- deavouring merely to establish the presence of restraint without illusion. I am pointing out that the limit to pleasant activity may be, in a word, not theoretical but moral. And this result still holds, I now go on to urge, where the speci- fic sense of play is clearly present. In cricket, for example, or in cards I am obviously under restraint, while as obviously, at least to my mind, there is no trace of make-believe. Un- less I am a professional or a devotee, I am aware that these activities are optional. They do not matter in themselves, and their scope is limited by that in life which really does matter. And, in the second place, to secure a better exercise of the activity, it is carried on subject to conventional re- straints. I am in other words limited by the rules of the well as by the consciousness that, as against what is more
 * ame, which exclude at once mere trifling and violence, as