88 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



and weakest, suggesting that the birds' later capacity 

 for singing might be gauged by their first twittering. 

 These loud, piercing notes are by no means signs of 

 hunger, but, on the contrary, indicate the greatest con- 

 tentment, for they cease at once when the mother leaves 

 them and cool air fills the nest." 



I must insert here a remark that belongs to the 

 idealization of play. We may safely assume that the 

 satisfaction of instinctive impulse is not the only pleas- 

 ure in experimentation. Even in the animal intelli- 

 gence it denotes a finer psychical state. Preyer calls 

 the satisfaction it affords, pleasure in the possession of 

 power, in " being a cause " — such, for example, as the 

 child feels when he tears a paper into fragments.* 



Lessing expressed it abstractly when he said that we 

 become more intensely conscious of our reality by means 

 of such strong excitations, f and animals may have the 

 same feeling as an accompaniment of instinctive ac- 

 tivity, and especially of playful experimentation. It 

 may be lacking in the very earliest infancy, but the 

 little polar bear that delightedly tore the paper bag 

 to bits certainly felt the pleasure of " being a cause " — 

 "in working his own sweet will,'' as Schiller has it in his 

 Kunstlern. This principle is even more applicable to 

 the examples which follow, relating as they do to more 

 mature animals. Before going on, however, I wish to 

 call attention to the absurd form this pleasure in being 

 a cause sometimes takes even in rational beings. How 

 many of us want to scribble or whittle or do something 

 with our hands all the time, to break a twig and chew 

 it while we walk, to strike the snow off walls as we pass, 



* Die Seele des Kindes, p. 450. 



f Letter to Mendelssohn, February 2, 1757. 



