PLAY 255 
certain essential modes of skill were acquired,—those animals 
in which the preparatory play propensity was not inherited in 
due force and requisite amount being worsted in the combats 
of later life, and eliminated in the struggle for existence. 
For, in the preparatory tussles and squabbles and playful fights 
of young animals, experience is gained without serious risk to 
life and limb. 
The modifications of Professor Groos’s biological interpre- 
tation of play which we would suggest are so slight that we 
may be said to accept it almost unreservedly. The play of 
youth, we may urge, depends on instinctive propensities to 
experimentation in varied ways, some of more general and 
others of more special import ; and the value of such experi- 
mentation lies in the fact that it is a means of acquiring, 
under circumstances more easy and less dangerous than those 
of sterner life, experience and skill for future use. In a word, 
play depends on instinctive propensities of value in education. 
Passing now to a brief consideration of the feelings and 
emotions which we may suppose to accompany play, we may 
place first those which characterize, from this point of view, 
general experimentation. We have here rapidly varying 
situations charged with conative impulse, the satisfaction of 
which must bring pleasure—the occasional thwarting of which 
is probably toned with the opposite—the latter serving, through 
contrast, to enhance the satisfaction of ultimate success. Both 
pleasure and its antithetical state of feeling are primarily 
matters of the conscious situation as a whole, and even in 
ourselves are difficult to distribute in analysis. But assuredly 
no small share of the total product must be assigned to the 
successful behaviour which consummates the conative tendency. 
Indeed, it is the thwarting of free action which is the source 
of much of the discomfort of the young. Unimpeded and 
vigorous behaviour also brings with it secondary effects in organic 
processes—fuller heart-beat, freer circulation, deeper respira- 
tion, better digestion, firmer musctlar tone, and so forth— 
which have a marked effect on the conscious situation, and aid 
in producing that emotional tone which cannot, perhaps, be 
