Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/53

 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 39 1. " The feeling of pleasure that results from the satisfac- tion of instinct is the primary psychic accompaniment of )lay." But are we always happy when we are playing? )r. Lewis Paton tells a story of a boy whom he found crying HI Primrose Hill because he had been a Boer three nights running. The game is undertaken for its own sake, not for the sake of the resultant or accompanying pleasure ; and impeded progress in the game will indubitably bring pain. The criterion of pleasure is insufficient to mark off play from work. Successful activity, even in what we do not like doing, brings a pleasure of its own. Much of this world's work is pleasurable throughout ; and pleasure is not an invariable accompaniment of playful activities. 2. Prof. Groos continues : ' ' And further, energetic action is in itself a source of pleasure ". No doubt, under some circumstances, energetic action may be pleasurable ; but all play is not energetic, and much work is. 3. We have " that joy in ability or power which," says Prof. Groos, " has confronted us as the most important psychic feature of play ". Certainly, if we are successful at our games, we have the joy which accompanies success, but this joy also accompanies successful work, and frequently to a far greater extent. Probably the view that play is dis- tinguished from work only as a preliminary practice or preparation may have had some effect in obscuring the antithesis between the two, for the criteria of ' play ' given above do not seem to me to mark it off from other activities with which it is usually contrasted. It is, of course, possible to regard all early activities as ' play,' but to do so would be to break violently with common sense and almost wholly to neglect its denotation. There is a difficulty, however, beyond that of selection and definition, if we approach the question from the animal side. In early animal activities, how are we to mark off play from the serious activities of life? Some day, perhaps, when the exact part played by tradition and education among the lower animals has been more fully dealt with, it may be )ossible to mark off the spontaneous and the playful from the taught, but it is hardly so to-day. IV. PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAY PERCEPTION AND IMAGINATION. The place of imagination in early play has, I think, been reatly overestimated ; the term ' imagination ' has been