THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANIMAL PLAY. 325 



is a world to itself, into which we enter voluntarily 

 and come out when we will. There we seem freed 

 from necessity because in conscious self -illusion we feel 

 ourself to be an absolute cause. 



We are now approaching the end of our inquiry. The 

 joy in being a cause having culminated in the highest 

 and most refined of pleasurable feelings — namely, in that 

 of liberty — we find here the deep significance of that di- 

 vision of consciousness which occupied us in the last 

 section. The difficulty of explaining it consists in the 

 fact that in play we take appearance for reality, and 

 still do not confuse it with the actual. In many cases 

 the leaping over of our consciousness to the real I is 

 conceivable, but in the most intense enjoyment this 

 off-shooting of consciousness does not take place, and we 

 must suppose an unconscious connection between the real 

 and play egos that obviates the necessity for this alterna- 

 tion. We have found such a connection in the feeling 

 of being a cause without going into the nature of these 

 psychic adjuncts of make-believe. This is now the place 

 for such an inquiry. 



I have throughout this whole treatise spoken not of 

 the idea but of the feeling of being a cause. A conscious 

 idea that we ourselves produce the appearnce is as little 

 supposable during intense enjoyment as the idea, " This 

 is only a pretence." What glides over from the real I, 

 and is recognisable by self-observation, is only the feel- 

 ing of pleasure arising from the consciousness of being a 

 cause and culminating in the feeling of freedom. There 

 are, empirically speaking, no pure feelings that can be 

 distinguished from ideas as such, no abstract pleasure or 

 pain.* Feeling is always, in its finer manifestations, the 



* Cf. Lehmann, Hauptgesetze des Gefiililslebens, p. 16. 



