76 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 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 Konnen.^'^ Only an extreme and one- sided intellectualism separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do. From the ethical stand- point, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real sub- ject of knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man, says Xenophon, who is always study- ing 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 analo- gous; 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 a 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.
1 To know and to have the power to do.
77 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 grow- ing and die. While to be weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a sense of superior- ity, 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 oxygena- tion and elimination, the best reaction of all the gangli- onic and sympathetic activities is aroused, 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 disposi- tion, 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 in- dividual 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 w^e can not analyze them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint things we can not apprehend. Later 78 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES the rehearsals are fuller, and their significance more in- telligible, 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 as 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 ab- sence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know it not.
Gulick ^ 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 ner- vous and muscular systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back of them a racial set- ting. So running and dodging with speed and endur- ance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and fighting. Now that the need of these is less urgent for utilitarian purposes, they are still necessary for per- fecting the organism. This makes, for instance, base- ball racially familiar, because it represents activities 1 Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.
79 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE that were once and for a long time necessary for sur- vival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coordination that have been of great racial utility. The best athletic sports and games are 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 emo- tions 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 ex- ternal form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activi- ties, 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 must 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 handed down rather than insist upon those ar- bitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of heredity. The best guide to the former is interest, zest, and spontaneity. Hereditary momenta 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. ^ As Hughlings Jacl^on has well shown, 1 The Influence of Exercise upon Growth, by Frederic Burk. Ameri- can Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 340-349.
80 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 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, deg- lutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only the kind but the time of forms and de- grees 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 suc- ceeded by a period of augmentation, and this may oc- cur several times. Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often sur- prising 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 stimu- lated with light, medullation was premature and im- perfect; 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 em- ployed in gro^vth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of latent cells; or, as in young children, the nascent period of finger move- ments may stimulate that of the thumb which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their subsequent coordination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher level. Thus exercise ought to de- velop 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 im- portance. The following are the chief attempts yet 81 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE made to fix them, which show the significance of adoles- cence.
The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight and nine/ and it is nearly ended at fif- teen, 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 stab- bing 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^ 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 1 A study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A. C. Ellis. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.
2 Studies in Imagination, by Lillian H. Chalmers. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.
«9 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 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 whole- some 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 ^ 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 al- most exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence ' ' two elements predominate — first, the plays are predominantly team games, in which the in- 1 Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popxilar Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 793-805.
83 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE dividual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in which there is cooperation among a number for a given end, in which play has a program and an end. The second character- istic 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 char- acteristic 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 ^ 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 specialization 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 stead- ily 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 1 Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.
84 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES or another to gain an advantage over one's fellows, in which the interest is in 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 role in all the child's amusements, and from the thirteenth year '' amusements take on a decidedly cooperative and competitive character, and efforts are more 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 cooperate.
McGhee ^ 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 near- ly seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization 1 A study in the Plaj^ Life of Some South Carolina Children. Peda- gogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.
85 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 preeminent. Even at this age the principle of organi- zation 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 in- tense 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 86 PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that arsis 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 repeti- tive, 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, and diversified. It is thus nat- ural that during the period of greatest strength incre- ment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly ac- centuated. 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, base- ball and football, basket-ball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. These latter emphasize 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 re- jects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism in- volved 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 overemphasized time marking, experience a great broadening of the hori- zon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental pow- er 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 sym- metry of well-developed periods — and all, as I am con- vinced, 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 old- est 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 on 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 con- ceive 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 rhj^thm is God " seems borne out not only in history, but by the nature of thought and atten- tion that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if in- fluenced 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 88 ^ PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 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 ritualized it in the spring and made it a large part of the education of boys after the age of thir- teen. Neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicu- lar 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 ser- vices. The early Christian bishops, called pra?suls, 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, imi- tating 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 Moliere says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mys- teries 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