6386 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
of age periods. Enthusiasm is the spirit of healthy childhood. It 
carries the burden of sustained volitional effort until the capacity 
for sustained effort is established as a habit. 
Play, therefore, is a better developer than work of the whole work 
mechanism. It develops organic vitality, nervous energy and skill, 
interests, volitional attention and enthusiasm together, as a unified 
and efficient working whole. Work is less effective because it dis- 
associates the development of the capacity for enthusiasm from the 
development of the capacity for volitional effort and attention in 
realizing aims. 
The capacity to work, therefore, as a part of the capacity to live, 
is best developed in the child’s natural life or play. It is developed 
only in a negative way when the child sits still and does things 
foreign to its nature in obedience to the commands of adults. Such 
lack of activity depresses vitality and inhibits the development of 
the nervous system, volitional enthusiasm, and experience. It is one 
of the several factors that have caused children to ‘‘forget how to 
play.” 
The capacity to work from its simplest to its highest form is 
acquired most efficiently by living out in activity, broadly and in- 
-tensely, the hungers and instincts characteristic of each age period; 
living them out in a social environment that supplies not only pro- 
gressively greater opportunities for activity, experience, and self- 
expression, but progressively greater opportunities for accomplish- 
ment under a leader who molds ideals, and under social contacts 
charged with emulation. By realizing-a progressive series of aims 
in play, the child learns how to work and to achieve life through 
work. This is the law of child progress. 
If the capacity to work does not come out of these inspirations to 
live and work, nothing this side of a new ancestry can give it, and 
the individual is a subject for an institution for the socially dependent. 
The developing work mechanism will be used in fulfilling social 
duties and obligations, when the social spirit in the child’s instine- 
tive loyalty, cooperation, self-subordination, and capacity for leader- 
ship is converted gradually into a consciousness of social relation- 
ships, interdependence, and obligations. This can be accomplished 
through the socializing influence of a progressive social experience 
under a leader who has in the background of his consciousness a 
social aim. 
Again, the work mechanism will be used in acquiring racial culture 
and a higher adjustment through the use of books when social expe- 
rience and leadership bring a consciousness of their worth. This will 
come early in some, later in others, probably not at all in many, but 
until books are attached to the central and developing enthusiasms 
aoeie ae ame Cn, tee 
