Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/484

 470 F. H. BRADLEY : serious, my activity does not matter. This is the nature of the restraint which, to my mind, is both effective and obvious. Illusion and make-believe on the other hand I am unable to discern. "But," I shall be told, "you are ignoring the play in which make-believe is obvious. A girl with .her doll, a boy with a wooden sword, are plain instances which confute you. And the actor in stage-plays, you seem to forget, is called a player. And to deny here the presence of every kind of make-believe and illusion is surely irrational." But I reply that such a denial is no part of my case. All that I have been urging so far is that illusion does not belong essentially or everywhere to play. Playing on the contrary, we may now go on to see, is of various kinds. And playing of one kind undoubtedly involves make-believe. It implies within limits the treatment of the imaginary as if it were real. If you take make-believe as the playing at practical belief, as our acting within limits as if the facts here and now were qualified, as we know that in fact they are not qualified- then make-believe, it is obvious, belongs to some play. But to argue from this that, where I do not play at believing, I must pretend in order to play, seems clearly illogical. Whether in short, and how far, in any play there is illusion, depends in each case that is all I urge upon the nature of the play. We have seen that in some play there is no pretence or illusion. The exercise of the activity involves no excursion into the imaginary world. But, as can easily be seen with children, this imaginary element soon appears, and in playing it occupies a great space, how great I need not discuss. The perceived facts here do not suffice for the required activity. They are therefore extended by im- aginary qualifications, and the activity becomes possible. And at this point a new kind of restraint and limit can be observed. All playing involves a limit, but in some plays this limit, we saw, was simply what we called moral. Beyond a certain point, that is, I must not. But where make-believe comes in, we find a new sort of control. The child that pretends in play knows that morally it must not cross a certain line. But it knows now also that it has an imaginary world, which is limited by real fact and again in some cases by con- ventional suppositions. A school-boy playing at soldiers knows first (a) that he must hurt no one too much, but he knows also (&) that he is a school-boy as well as a soldier. And he knows (c) that, so long as certain conventions are