Biologists and psychologists have made many interesting enquiries into the motives that prompt animals and human beings to play.The forms of play, the rhythm or patterns into which the organic cooperations of muscular and nervous tensions and discharges cast themselves, are found to have some direct relation to the serious pursuits of adult life, the protection against enemies, the pursuit of prey and other food, courtship, mating and the care of the young, and the corporate movements necessary for the protection of the horde or tribe.So interpreted, play is an instinctive education for life.Nature is full of indirectness, and a great deal of this play is not closely imitative of any particular sort of useful activity but is directed to general fitness.This applies particularly to the higher animals who are less exclusively directed by separate particular instincts and are liable to have to meet novel and irregular emergencies that call for general adaptability of body and of mind.The play of higher animals and especially of human young will thus run largely into forms in which the intellectual and emotional powers will have large scope, where spontaneous variation and free imagination will express themselves, and where the more or less routine rhythms of the primitive dance or song or mock fight will pass into higher forms of individual cunning and competitive exploit, having as their main biological and social 'meaning' the practice of an efficient mental and emotional equipment.Play thus considered is an experimentation of vital powers.Its utility for child-life is commonly admitted.In fact, there is a grave danger lest the spontaneity and instinctive direction which nature has implanted should be damaged by the attempts of educationalists to force the vital utility of play by organising it into 'set games.' Though we need not rudely rule out reasonable regulation from this, as from any other department of life, it would be well to remember that play has powerful directive instincts behind it in child-life which adult notions of economy may gravely misconceive and injure by over-regulation.Hasty endeavours to displace instinct by reason in child-life are likely to prove costly to human welfare in the long run.The spontaneous joy of those activities of childhood that seem most 'wasteful' is probably a far better index to welfare than any pedagogic calculations.
But because the human utility of play is great for children, it does not follow that it is small for men and women.Even the physiological and much more the psychological utility of play lasts through life, though doubtless in diminishing value.For adult workers mere repose never exhausts the use of leisure.The biological or the social utility of his play may be much smaller than in the case of the young.But it will remain considerable.
Nor is this utility chiefly expressed in the relation between play and invention.The chief justification for leisure does not consist in its contribution to the arts of industry but rather in raising the banner of revolt against the tyranny of industry over human life.
§9.We have grown so accustomed to regard business as the absorbing occupation of man, that which necessarily and rightly claims the major part of his waking hours, that a society based on any other scale of values seems inconceivable.Though history has made us familiar with civilisations, such as those of Athens and of Rome, where a large body of free citizens regarded politics, art, literature and physical recreations as far more important occupations, we know that such civilisations rested on a basis of slave labour.We do not seem to realise that for the first time in history two conditions are substantially attained which make it technically possible for a whole people to throw off the dominion of toil.Machinery and Democracy are these two conditions.If they can be brought into effective coordination, so that the full economics of machine production can be rendered available for the people as a whole, the domination of industry over the lives, the thoughts, and the hearts of men, can be overthrown.This is the great problem of social-economic reconstruction, to make industry the servant of all men, not the servants of the few, the masters of the many.Its solution demands, of course, that after the wholesome organic needs are satisfied, the stimulation of new material wants shall be kept in check.For if every class continues constantly to develop new complicated demands, which strain the sinews of industry even under a socially-ordered machine-economy, taking the whole of its increased control of Nature in new demands upon Nature for economic satisfaction, the total burden of industry on Man is nowise lightened.If we are to secure adequate leisure for all men, and so to displace the tyranny of the business life by the due assertion of other higher and more varied types of life, we must manage to check the lust of competitive materialism which industrialism has implanted in our hearts.
