CHAPTER VI

PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES

The view of Groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as

rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical training,

its ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of infancy as

keys to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers before those

that are later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that interest due

to their antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished by age--Play

preferences of children and their reasons--The profound

significance of rhythm--The value of dancing and also its

significance, history, and the desirability of re-introducing

it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military

ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground

movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work.

Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more

popular field. Here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules.

Artifacts often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty

purely hereditary momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek both the

motor tendencies and the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the

past. The view of Groos that play is practise for future adult

activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the

past where lie the keys to all play activities. True play never

practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often

calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a

number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves

out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and

used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never

mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play

as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in

the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin to

rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to the stated activities

of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught, and

non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and

exact expressions of their motor needs. The young grow up into the

same forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long

preceded them, only to a limited extent; and if the form of every

human occupation were to change to-day, play would be unaffected save

in some of its superficial imitative forms. It would develop the motor

capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of our past heritage, and

the transformation of these into later acquired adult forms is

progressively later. In play every mood and movement is instinct with

heredity. Thus we rehearse the activities of our ancestors, back we

know not how far, and repeat their life work in summative and

adumbrated ways. It is reminiscent albeit unconsciously, of our line

of descent; and each is the key to the other. The psycho-motive

impulses that prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have

transmitted to us their habitual activities. Thus stage by stage we

reënact their lives. Once in the phylon many of these activities were

elaborated in the life and death struggle for existence. Now the

elements and combinations oldest in the muscle history of the race are

rerepresented earliest in the individual, and those later follow in

order. This is why the heart of youth goes out into play as into

nothing else, as if in it man remembered a lost paradise. This is why,

unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body, and also why it so

makes for unity of body and soul that the proverb "Man is whole only

when he plays" suggests that the purest plays are those that enlist

both alike. To address the body predominantly strengthens unduly the

fleshy elements, and to overemphasize the soul causes weakness and

automatisms. Thus understood, play is the ideal type of exercise for

the young, most favorable for growth, and most self-regulating in both

kind and amount. For its forms the pulse of adolescent enthusiasm

beats highest. It is unconstrained and free to follow any outer or

inner impulse. The zest of it vents and satisfies the strong passion

of youth for intense erethic and perhaps orgiastic states, gives an

exaltation of self-feeling so craved that with no vicarious outlet it

often impels to drink, and best of all realizes the watchword of the

Turners, _frisch, frei, fröhlich, fromm_ [Fresh, free, jovial,

pious.].

Ancient Greece, the history and literature of which owe their

perennial charm for all later ages to the fact that they represent the

eternal adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this

enthusiasm means for youth. Jäger and Guildersleeve, and yet better

Grasberger, would have us believe that the Panhellenic and especially

the Olympic games combined many of the best features of a modern prize

exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, Derby day, a Wagner festival, a

meeting of the British Association, a country cattle show,

intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that they were the

"acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory, and that

night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their

splendor. The deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the

inspiration of the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in

doing them honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. The

victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with

each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were

taken down for his entry and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom

the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the

representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to

the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with

his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal

prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and

even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls,

but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom

weakness was perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin,

argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely

entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a

slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well

and strong is to be a philosopher--_valare est philosophari_. The

Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and

physical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could

hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was

dependent. Knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a

dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous if it

does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does

not develop a motor side. Body culture is ultimately only for the sake

of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all

muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with

soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an

anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric,"

is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives

not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life

and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings

consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble

and brings out individuality.

How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental

training in the land and day of Socrates is seen in the identification

of knowledge and virtue, "_Kennen und Können_." [To know and to have

the power to do] Only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism

separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do.

From the ethical standpoint, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is

the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real subject of

knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man,

says Xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the

happiest who feels that he is improving. Life is a skill, an art like

a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good moral and

physical development are more than analogous; and where intelligence

is separated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract, and

desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience and

psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually

inspiring.

Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but

work and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the

past. The first influence of all right exercise for those in health is

feeling of well-being and exhilaration. This is one chief source of

the strange enthusiasm felt for many special forms of activity, and

the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms of it that are

hygienically unfit. To act vigorously from a full store of energy

gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly

intoxicate. Animals must move or cease growing and die. While to be

weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a

sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, courage, confidence,

enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the

etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, agile, strong, is

especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have so

disposed our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes

are stimulated, products of decomposition are washed out by

oxygenation and elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic

and sympathetic activities is accused, and vegetative processes are

normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit almost to the point of

ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate, and

mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature

localization is most deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and

rate contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition,

gives moral self-control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that

great word means, and favors all higher human aspirations.

In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that

the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral

momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the

combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice

raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are

hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many

elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze

them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint

things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and

their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the

correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is

always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current

of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral

joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our

play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges

our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its

traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from

play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is

prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of

youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible

characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of

play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and

muscles know it not.

Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting

than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with

accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers

were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame

enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular

systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back

of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and

endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and

fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian

purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This

makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents

activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival.

We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great

racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these

racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of

great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so

loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back

to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was

by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why

certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they

touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that

play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing

racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,

but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic

content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived

out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played

off, each in its own time.

The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to

develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the

individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular

forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those

arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of

heredity. The best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and

spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in

which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come

first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much

later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the

same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are

controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication,

deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only

the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best

prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are

seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded

by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times.

Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics,

which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often

surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of

twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed

that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at

birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and

imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know

that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation

of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as

Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally

employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension

and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the

nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb

which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their

subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher

level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and

fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great

harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of

great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are

the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance

of adolescence.

The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight

and nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may

persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with

dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old,

ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for

marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus.

Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a

four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido,

after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife

by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly

realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or

feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in

secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single

women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those

who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student

concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent

years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played

with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually

most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and

less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct

that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle

points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls

are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always

children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and

reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but

where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the

height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of

future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is

probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second

dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as

children with too great abandonment are those who make the best

mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of

motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and

unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome

direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both

by psychologists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the

individual of the history of the race can probably be found even

though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to

each its phyletic correlate.

In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish

periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to

characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and

of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two

periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously,

but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to

twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive,

but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are

predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less

sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in

which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play

has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is

with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage

out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing,

fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This

characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of

adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage,

endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."

Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of

amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all

others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were

represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among

boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different

amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but

for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number,

and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are

suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in

boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and

at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original

make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily

and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily

from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys.

"A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their

teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or

another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n

the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a

tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no

longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and

society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the

kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older,

society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from

the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and

competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the

accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will

concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be

devoted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The

instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At

fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make

something and perhaps to coöperate.

McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found

a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to

eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to

fifteen, and a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven

onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct

decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. Games

involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen

and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference

even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly

seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization upon a few plays

was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in

general there were a large number of plays which were popular with

none preëminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in

games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed

the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet,

and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most

favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it,

it would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different

seasons were most marked among boys, in part, at least, because their

activities are more out of doors.

Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of

primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic

features. No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which

is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental

movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every

important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in

language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves

seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor

was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and

even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and

social principles. In the dark background of history there is now much

evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced.

They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so

deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least

expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the

human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many

work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping,

the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that

areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent

originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases

work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are

lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are

obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used

to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be

oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music,

as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them,

just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial,

special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that

during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular

development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements

should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love

marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in

the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic

clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more

automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of

constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers,

rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war,

calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with

music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and

football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are

concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict factor,

best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more

stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of

musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to

make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to

proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the

neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.

Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this

change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those

who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised

time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of

consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope,

all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the

sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good

ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I

am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements

which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time

marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took

precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming

later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic

feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make

poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack,

gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows

its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war,

love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent

of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music

is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only

in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not

move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on

stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging

as a compound pendulum.

Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor

needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor

education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological

irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of

its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient

times China ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of

the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was

originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In

Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the

Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St.

Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian

bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and

only in 692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and

others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added

charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in

Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language

of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great

dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own

legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The

character of people is often learned from their dances, and Molière

says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are

often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries

can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider

the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first

invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says

that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot

politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the

polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The

Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National

dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the _Reihen_, of

Germany, the _rondes_ of France, the Spanish tarantella and

_chaconne_, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc.,

express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the

stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild

_salterrelle_, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and

skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and

other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon

and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love,

mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service,

symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or

characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the

dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best

but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad

associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a

work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not

excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can

be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will,

inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other

agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul,

give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer

muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can

serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the

heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue.

That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance

aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although

even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities

in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find

vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another

interesting chapter.

Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another

correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of

spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history

of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and

civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The

former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then

put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare,

migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and

manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization

advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in

all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and

religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy

in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long

before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races

is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when

harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the

monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is

more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert.

Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates

are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that

suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day

and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for

males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and

commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it

lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during

this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter

exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative

existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle

habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in

college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent.

This is not reversion, but partly expression of the nature and perhaps

the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of

revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of

variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled

freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of

civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable

passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for

its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the

utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a

stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying

of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and

flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the

blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly

growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. When

maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the

phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one

factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a

rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to

compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset

oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in

all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic

period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or

suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be

realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is

treated more fully elsewhere.

Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal

conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some

sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and

primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes

contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the

defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked

against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most

degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has shown how

the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly

in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon.

Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled,

arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers

twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge

out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose,

or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off

a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger,

man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is

distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts,

cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty,

disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the

spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some

morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything

suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more

or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before

strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious

bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth

brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal

manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be

eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils

that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of

moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly,

craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can not fight

physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is

generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his

masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the

core. Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great

problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and

direct it.

Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great English

schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly

recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and

traditions abound in illustrations of its man-making and often

transforming influence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold.

It makes against degeneration, the essential feature of which is

weakening of will and loss of honor. Real virtue requires enemies, and

women and effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while

a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes,

casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is

overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight,

and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour

out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught

boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and

brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal

contest I would interest a certain class of boys in it and try to

devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest

it generates. Like dancing it should be rescued from its evil

associations, and its educational force put to do moral work, even

though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects

of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school

for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and

self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows.

Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has

been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly

disposition. It has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow

and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering

but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it

addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and

conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of

proper purgation, but I know from both personal practise and

observation that they are not unconquerable.

This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its

comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been

warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while

Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of

Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans

have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The

dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which

under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing,

prompting, according to Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to

fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in Jena early in this

century. It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette

demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although

this professor who had his own face scarred on the _mensur_, pleaded

for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and

even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more

inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel

had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means

that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and

this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and

degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is

often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain

sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training,

slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn

directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line

that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds

normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or

feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best

safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs

rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification

against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with

excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art susceptible of high

development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great

quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest

of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.

Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the

Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is

inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a

fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big

one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty

of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and

love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in

love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of

poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the _bushi_

is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the _samurai_

is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility.

At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given

him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith

whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They

have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a

charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they

must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery,

horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for

offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life

cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the

soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of

ethics and physical training.

Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis

champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion.

They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke

which would have lost this country its championship. The English

player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar

mistake that the best man might win. The chief evil of modern American

football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the

lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise.

These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best

and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young

man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical

degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones

and even deaths it causes.

Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a

high development, and which, although now more known and practised as

athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special

disciplinary capacities in its various forms. It represents the most

primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with

man. Purged of its barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and

properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than

any other form--for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the

upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its manual of

feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness,

quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no cruelty

or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body,

emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a

peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities,

developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many

undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer

and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and

conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character

among contests is unique. As a school of posture for art, its

varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it

contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every

muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is

most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by

very many kinds of excellence.

Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the

_sæva animi tempestas_ [Fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. A testy,

quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is

repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its

victories and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well

controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of

bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of

outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance

may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct

advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the

strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too

repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and

the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an

outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm,

and gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on

by our correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies

whatever the provocation, I would praise those whose best title of

honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose

dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even

sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth

than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and

psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it

sometimes is, its real alternative.

So closely are love and war connected that not only is individual

pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when

animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of

offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which

makes teams possible or more permanent. Football, baseball, cricket,

etc., and even boating can become schools of mental and moral

training. First, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to

master and observe them effectively is no mean training for the mind

controlling the body. These are steadily being revised and improved,

and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct of the

game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the

subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates

the social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school,

college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and

all. Group loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked

increment in coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of

puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports

at this age, can be so utilized as to develop a spirit of service and

devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the

church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that

prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the

applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The

long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers,

who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside

academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment

on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of

their educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has

imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction

with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal

enthusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of

friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears

sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts

from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The

elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions

have no units like the English colleges to be pitted against each

other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students

obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering

methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both

students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of

experience. On the whole, there is less license in "breaking training"

and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably

predominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope.

Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are

helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more

wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in

step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of

body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in

the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves

care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform

levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and

especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the

two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to

an academic course, and the army is called, not without some

justification, the poor man's university. It gives severe drill,

strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare

and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many

useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles;

these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great

promoter of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for

midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that

visit a wide curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where

each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery

courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a

few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character

to the spirit of any institution. The very fancy of being in any sense

a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and

tactics, army life and service, military history, battles, patriotism,

the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of

honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this

line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual

opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy

to create pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history

have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were

won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the

best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different

grades and lands.

A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest

factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their

charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics

in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous

with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling,

balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who

turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant,

brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and

commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk

as seen in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse

to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and

pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's

muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely

conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more

glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of

the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its

own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other

sex from what they are with their own!--and some are transformed into

different beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend,

bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good

point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and

glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even

though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt

and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men

and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is

ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong,

and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and refining. As is shown

later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is

sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a

sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she

be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most

influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and

good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be

brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity,

and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and

educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her

royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that

pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating

others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as

much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence

enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to

compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which

both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the

disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than

antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best

to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the

latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator

rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the

physical education of adolescents.

How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our

schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the

reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country

are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that

the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer,

trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement--traits

not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet

learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks

why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected

by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild

beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile

warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were

free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are

virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship

women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the

heart controls men.

Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at

this age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his

hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward

partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and

tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the

water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys,

lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best

possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all

gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the

heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of

excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so

easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to

skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects

of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not

inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing

overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is

unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as

are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and

liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. Its

stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers

upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly

or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs.

The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating

and gives a sense of freedom. Where practicable it is well to dispense

with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is

enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the

free swim in cold water is most invigorating.

Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly

realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from

bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and

plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction

even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water,

and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in

London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and

distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing

toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference

of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks

this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according

to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks

all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the

motivation of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San

Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations

for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of

fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small

children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one

great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand

spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the

presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes

wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer

evenings and seasons are being prolonged.

Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just

before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like

swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope

varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and

in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psychologically allied to

these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often

provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds

of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by

the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the

walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space

economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of

hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey,

tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet,

and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have

great "thumogenic" or emotional power.

Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part.

Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long

apprenticeship.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of

locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the

tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the

mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more

normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing

is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If

Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top.

Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and

regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully

explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too

prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary

lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and

opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of

cobblers.

The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to

many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and

even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions

and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to

distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when,

beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals,

which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile

delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the

George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter;

nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both

good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground

fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as

resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will

become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow

transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a

boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest,

not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of

play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal

zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg

top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and

right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small

menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of

excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer,

with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and

sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand

and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for

all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as

digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises

in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs,

parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this

work--such are the practical problems.

The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most

crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was

expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are

prone to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[17]

and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent

the "fathering" of the police, without, at least, the minimum control

of a system of permits and exclusions. If hoodlums play at all, they

become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they

do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hall House or the

Civic League, and prefer at first scrub games with individual

self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the "arboreal instincts

of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to

fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally

occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and

catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to

use horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at

this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision

than the country youth. The young tough is commonly present, and

though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often

for his heroic as for his bad traits.

Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a

wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm

which helps against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the

intercourse of students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of

diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a

team to break training would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he

is set apart to win fame for his class or college. It supplies a

splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt

the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would

otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies new and

advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and

idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect

for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the

necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or

dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests

has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great

and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or

more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. It furnishes

now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces

the number of those physically unfit for college, and should give

education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious

dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of

victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the

popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and

methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a

disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction

with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take

unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games,

spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and

mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of

the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of

senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and

powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental

toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.

The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of

their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls

regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against

that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play.

This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern

baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian

laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning

"eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games

international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no

tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the

free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets

and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every

emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet,

jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this

separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and

professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for

hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners,

sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful

measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep

chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg

being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms,

narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of

small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer

individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within

the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his

recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and

initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.

The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber

those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games

differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of

some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys

from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and

run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys

showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid

increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games

of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight,

pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly

excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year,

both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number

of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these

plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far

larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a

course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and

also according to their educational value as teaching observation,

reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and

biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand,

arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best

games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But

children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily

learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment

has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to

gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools,

teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to

turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work.

Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be

given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no

profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.

Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work

should not be taught. Education perhaps should really begin with

directing childish sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and

most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later

life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness, for play makes

the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. Says

Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is

in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is

in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever

accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in

it." Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers"

in our times in merry old England[22] every one played games; and

laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's

maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with

full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious,

and tons, age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as _laborari_, [To

labor] so _ludere, et joculari orare sunt_. [To play and to jest are

to pray] Laughter itself, as Kühne long ago showed, is one of the most

precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their

tension.[23]

The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived,

for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the

psycho-physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in

play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in

the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown

into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the

stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done

by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of

it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest,

breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children

who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work

without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology

conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without

zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized

when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills

of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those

who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play.

Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because

it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its

exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it

is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful

tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided

personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul,

and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external,

mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless

endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and

inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived

and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful

in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from

within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all

methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function

regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in

wrong directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if

overtense, result in "hysterical convulsions." It is also the best

form of self-expression; and its advantage is variability, following

the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished

centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great

agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social

function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals.

The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they

rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring

individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless,

grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and,

because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement,

is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms

often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse

work with the play spirit, and _vice versa_, that the present

distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be

less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly systematised

into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this,

we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery

and recreation.

The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic

impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace,

multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits,

ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and

neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a

tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken

the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper,

covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and

only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on

in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do

individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and

turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity

between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering

effort, for _In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister_ [The master

shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is

complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul

texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that

can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain

unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism,

saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder,

but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus

willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of

education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is

still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and

higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus

that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The

person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and

weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will

culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance

influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and

feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what

arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes

weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces

knowing and doing, _Kennen_ and _Können_, a separation which the

Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or

was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that

the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked

over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and

still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only

action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do

muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas

rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be

eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to

those of creative imagination and idealism.

The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of

fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and

penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional

patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because

they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and

coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere

lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and

parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is

at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that

does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to

supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates

such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue

proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate

utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions

that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin

says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer.

Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have

the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life

and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of

play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation.

The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play,

are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is

only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its

best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true

genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of

doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage

to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens.

Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not

_vice versa_; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop

playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at

the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research

from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization,

are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how,

for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice,

crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion.

National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the

last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental

stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psychologist

that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of

service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace

Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred

reformers."

[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American

Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]

[Footnote 2: The Influence of Exercise upon Growth by Frederic Burk.

American Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp.

340-349.]

[Footnote 3: A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A.C. Ellis.

Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.]

[Footnote 4: Studies in Imagination, by Lilian H. Chalmers.

Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.]

[Footnote 5: Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popular

Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 703-805.]

[Footnote 6: Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical

Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.]

[Footnote 7: A Study in the Play Life of Some South Carolina Children.

Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 439-478.]

[Footnote 8: Arbeit und Rythmus. Trubner, Leipzig, 1896.]

[Footnote 9: Descent of Man. D. Appleton and Co., 1872, vol. 1, chap.

vi, p. 204 _et seq_]

[Footnote 10: Teasing and Bullying. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897,

vol. 4, pp. 336-371.]

[Footnote 11: See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology,

July, 1899, vol. 10, pp. 516-591.]

[Footnote 12: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19 Jahrhunderts, 6th

ed., Göschen, Leipzig, 1896. See also H. P. Shelden: History and

Pedagogy of American Student Societies, New York, 1901, p. 31 _et

seq_.]

[Footnote 13: Bushido: The Soul of Japan. An exposition of Japanese

thought, by Inazo Nitobé. New York, 1905, pp. 203 _et seq_.]

[Footnote 14: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii.]

[Footnote 15: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, éditeurs, Paris, 1902.]

[Footnote 16: See A.W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American

Journal of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]

[Footnote 17: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, by Joseph Lee.

Macmillan, New York, 1902, chaps. x and xi.]

[Footnote 18: C.O. Bernies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and

Jumper. American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5,

pp. 235-245.]

[Footnote 19: A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina

Children. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.]

[Footnote 20: Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary,

October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 97-133.]

[Footnote 21: An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London,

1902, p. 427 _et seq_.]

[Footnote 22: See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3

Vols., London, 1883.]

[Footnote 23: Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G.

Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology,

October, 1897, vol. 9, pp. 1-41.]

[Footnote 24: I. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien über Hysterie. F.

Deuticke, Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 _et seq_.]

[Footnote 25: See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival

Values of Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and

Education of the University of Colorado, Arthur Allin, Ph.D., Editor,

November, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 3-47]

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