Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/605

Rh preparation for life's serious duties, for the form of the latter is constantly changing while the plays of children remain much the same from year to year and century to century. Nor finally does he play because it is necessary for his complete growth that he should pass through the several stages of racial history. He plays because he is a child and to the child's natural and active life we give the name play to distinguish it from the life of conscious self-direction, of strain and effort and inhibition which evolution has imposed upon the adult human being.

When we say that all of the child's activity takes the form of play, the statement should be regarded as a general one and as such it is true. As the term play is actually used there are certain minor classes of responses which are not included. The child's instinctive shrinking from a large furry animal is as much a part of his original nature as his tendency to run and jump and climb and wade. His responses in the taking of food, likewise, and in protecting himself by crying are original inherited responses. But to crying and sucking and shrinking from objects of fear we do not give the name play, because, being of the immediate life-serving kind, they bear a closer resemblance to those responses to which in later life we give the name work, and we reserve the term play for that larger and characteristic class of activities which are distinguished from the conscious self-directive life of the man. The play reactions of children therefore belong to their original nature. They are instinctive. Social heredity may account for the forms of organization of many of the plays of children as well as the sham character which they assume when compared with their originally serious form, but the elements of the great mass of the plays which are dearest to the hearts of children are truly instinctive.

Possibly the objection may be made that in this account of children's play, our attention has been directed too much to the plays of boys and that the plays of girls have been disregarded. An important distinction arises here to which in this present writing only passing reference can be made. The life of stress and effort and self-direction of which play is the antithesis is essentially masculine. Man represents the centrifugal motive; he stands for movement, change, variety, adaptation; for activity, tension and effort. Woman represents the centripetal motive; she stands for passivity, permanence, stability, repose, relaxation, rest. She has greater measure and harmony. She has therefore less need of the release afforded by primitive forms of activity. Girls, of course, play and their plays follow the same laws as those of boys, but yet in less marked degree, while adult sports are for the most part masculine sports.

Just at present what we call civilization is tending in the direction of the masculine motive—to variation, adaptation, change—to effort,