Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/201

PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 187 diately, on adopting a playful attitude of body or mind, all classes of society seem to change their mental outfit. The man who in business acknowledges nothing but good evi- dence, talks superstition over his dinner table not wholly with disbelief. The sober, industrious student becomes a yell- ing yahoo. The law-abiding citizen will settle the disputes of play with his own right hand. One might almost be tempted to re-echo the cynic's utterance : " Life would be very toler- able were it not for its pleasures ". And one asks : Is all spontaneity bad ? Is there no spontaneous advance ? Has play no function except to degrade ? I propose to attempt some answer to these and similar questions in the next and final section. XII. PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY (v.) SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. So many questions of development, biological or psycho- logical, have been raised in the preceding pages that I cannot hope to have escaped considerable error both in interpreting the conclusions of others and in advancing my own. But it sometimes saves misconception, and may be of service both to the writer and reader, to attempt some sort of summary of connected conclusions as the writer conceives them. Pre-Darwinian biology concluded that given due liberty and sustenance, each individual would develop into a perfect being according to the law of its species. 1 And unimpeded development, spontaneity and liberty were enthroned as ethical ideals. To this group of conceptions belongs the play-preparation theory which finds such large expression in Froebel. The muddles of priest and statesman were respon- sible for the world's misery, spontaneous and unimpeded de- velopment of the individual would soon put things right ; thus ran the correlated political doctrine in the mouth of the demagogue and revolutionist. The educational doctrine which logically belongs to this has recently filtered down to the primary schools as " new ". But with Malthus and Darwin, and particularly with the doctrine of the Origin of Species, there came a great change. Spontaneous variation was indeed the moying force, but it might occur in one direction just as much as another. The environment selected which should survive. Struggle for sur- vival took the place of unimpeded development. God helps those who help themselves became the text of many edifying 1 i 'p. Graham Wallas, Froebelian Pedagogy, Child Life, July, 1901.