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The view of Groos that play is practise for future adult activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the past where lie the keys to all play activities. True play never practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often calls for.
Wallace shared it at one time in regard to the birds, their songs and nest-building, but abandoned it later, and fell back upon instinct or inherited habit. Some of the German writers, such as Brehm, Büchner, and the Müllers, seem to have held to the notion more decidedly. But Professor Groos had not yet opened their eyes to the significance of the play of animals.
What fisherman would not like to take his big fish over and over again, if he could be sure of doing it, not from cruelty, but for the pleasure of practicing his art? For further light on the subject of the significance of the play of animals, I refer the reader to the work of Professor Karl Groos called "The Play of Animals."
Lipps defines the aesthetic experience as a "thrill of sympathetic feeling," Groos as "sympathetic imitation," evidently assuming that pleasure accompanies this. But there are many feelings of sympathy, and joyful ones, which do not belong to the aesthetic realm.
Catlin, North American Indians, i. p. 36; see also ii. p. 347. W. I. Thomas, Sex and Society, pp. 115-6. For a good summary, see Donaldson's Growth of the Brain, pp. 241-48. See on this subject the two fine works by Karl Groos, The Play of Animals, The Play of Man. W. Temple, Repton School Sermons. Sanity and Insanity, p. 281. Adolescence, ii. pp. 286-7. Southey's Life of Wesley, chap. xxiv.
J. Darmesteter, in Récéjac, Essai sur les fondements de la connaissance mystique, p. 124. In such notions may perhaps be best found the genesis of the present superstitions in regard to "lucky" and "unlucky" numbers, like the number 13, which have such persistence. See Part Two, chapter II. Groos, Die Spiele der Thiere, pp. 308-312. Mabilleau, op. cit., p. 132.
"We have to admit," Groos observes, "the entrance of another instinct, the impulse to tend and foster, so closely connected with the sexual life. It is seemingly due to the co-operation of this impulse that the little female bird during courtship is so often fed by the male like a young fledgling.
Earlier writers, therefore, felt the need of special theories of play. The best known of these theories are, first, the Schiller-Spencer surplus energy theory; second, the Groos preparation for life theory; third, the G. Stanley Hall atavistic theory; fourth, the Appleton biological theory.
Karl Groos, Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft, systematische Darstellung von Schellings negativer Philosophie, 1889; Konstantin Frantz, Schellings positive Philosophie, in three parts, 1879-80; Ed. von Hartmann, Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, 1876, p. 650 seq.; Ad.
Although we have been surfeited with the repeated statement that the characteristic mark of esthetic creation is "being disinterested," it must be recognized, as Groos has so truly remarked, that the artist does not create out of the simple pleasure of creating, but in order that he may behold a mastery over other minds.
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