YOUTH

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.