Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

was done by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of
it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest, breathe,
keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children who can not play,
if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their
resources of vitality. Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the necessity
of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly
emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the
mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those who
come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play. Play, hardly less
than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it draws upon older stores and
strata of psycho-physic impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely
drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just
as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and
undivided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and
makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it
works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life.
Interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not
adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and
fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from
within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all methods of
organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability,
which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as
Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if overtense, result in "hysterical
convulsions." It is also the best form of self-expression; and its advantage is
variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and
overnourished centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great
agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social function
develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals. The dances, feasts,
and games of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and war and act
and dance out their legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is
menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy
and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is
more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may
be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and
vice versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the
transition will be less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly
systematised into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, we
may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and
recreation.