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