The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of fear, prizes,
examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which can only
tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked in, but which lead
an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity.
However precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized
are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and
parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root
and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule
of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With
age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam,
and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other
than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is praise, all
true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and
feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active
life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of play
slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The instincts,
feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method,
grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects
of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play
is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of
doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be
carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens. Grosswell says that
children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have
added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is,
at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of
research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization, are
measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in
bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, and decline are often
only arrest or backsliding or reversion. National and racial decline beginning in
eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of development of body and
mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A
psychologist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of
service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace Mann said,
"that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred reformers."
[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American
Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]