Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/198

184 w. H. WINCH: a very early devotion to work of some kind. Such men can ' play ' and play well ; but work, whether at school or univer- sity, in the classes of a polytechnic, or in the early conduct of business, absorbs their powers and almost monopolises their attention. They, too, then, begin their life work early, or at least begin a systematic and intentional preparation for it which is very far removed from the sort of preparation afforded by the unregulated spontaneities of play. Here then, assuredly, we have a class of facts which the preparation theory will find it very hard to embrace. Ex- tended play is said to be a condition of evolutionary progress, whilst the human factors, who most completely, if not en- tirely, exemplify that evolution, are the very ones who do not show the extended play period required by the theory. Perhaps one may be permitted to make a suggestion which would account for the vogue of this conception. Extended adolescence, extended preparation, no doubt mark a high position in Nature's scale ; we find the same thing enforced in civilised society. Scarcely any positions of much social importance are given to any who have not passed through a long professional training. Wage earning and re- munerative work begin late. But this is hardly because the individuals in question have been playing all the time. So much is the case otherwise that, when Mrs. Humphry Ward in Robert Elsmere wonders how it is that in preparing for one's life-work one must reduce one's self to the verge of death in the process, we allow much justification for the rhetorical exaggeration. And Prof. Lloyd Morgan's work on the lower animals in- dicates that they too owe very much to deliberate education on the part of their parents or other members of the social group to which they belong. But are all these extended preparations the preparations of play? The question seems only to admit of a negative answer. So that whilst it is perfectly true that an extended period of immaturity and preparation is a marked character- istic of the higher animals, the value of this period does not arise because there is more time for play, but because there is a longer period of comparative plasticity during which de- liberate education may go on. XI. PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY (iv.) KECAPITULATION THEORY. If we hold the doctrine of biological recapitulation at all, we must, I think, connect the spontaneous activities of child- hood with a preceding stage in adult work and thought.