74 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



actually the case — if, in other words, there were no such 

 thing as play? It would be necessary for the special 

 instincts to be elaborated to their last and finest details. 

 For if they were only imperfectly prepared, and there- 

 fore insufficient for the real end, the animal might as 

 well enter on his struggle for life totally unprepared. 

 The tiger, for instance, no longer fed by his parents, and 

 without practice in springing and seizing his prey, would 

 inevitably perish, though he might have an undefined 

 hereditary impulse to creep upon it noiselessly, strike 

 it down by a tremendous leap, and subdue it with tooth 

 and nail, for the pursued creature would certainly escape 

 on account of his unskilfulness.* 



Without play practice it would be absolutely indis- 

 pensable that instinct should be very completely devel- 

 oped, in order that the acts described might be accurately 

 performed by inherited mechanism, as is also the case 

 with such instinctive acts as are exhibited but once in 

 a lifetime. Even assuming this possibility, what be- 

 comes of the evolution of higher intelligence? Animals 

 would certainly make no progress intellectually if they 

 were thus blindly left in the swaddling-clothes of in- 

 herited impulse; but, fortunately, they are not so dealt 

 with. In the very moment when advancing evolution 

 has gone so far that intellect alone can accomplish more 

 than instinct, hereditary mechanism tends to lose its per- 

 fection, and the " chiselling out of brain predisposi- 

 tions" f by means of individual experience becomes more 

 and more prominent. And it is by the play of children 

 and animals alone that this carving out can be proper- 

 ly and perfectly accomplished. So natural selection 



* In such a case, of course, the parents would never have 

 brought him living prey to play with. 



f E. v. Hartmann, Philosophic des Unbewussten, iii, p. 244. 



