too brilliant, but it is more likely that she was experimenting, for in the following weeks she would often cover her eyes with her hands, and take them away, hide her face in a cushion or on her own arms, often saying ‘Dark,’ then look up, ‘Light now.’”[334] Tormenting animals is another direction in which the quest for a causal connection is evident. When André Theuriet was a four-year-old boy he threw a newborn puppy in the water just “pour voir,” and then wept bitterly because he could not rescue it.[335] As these demands of reason become prominent we can clearly see that we are approaching the limits of play. There are other cases, however, where the search for a causal connection can more assuredly be called playful. An essential feature of the enjoyment derived from mental contests is the calculation of the result. Several possibilities are before the player, and he enjoys the intellectual effort of testing each and using the most advantageous. In the solution of whist and chess problems and such like, rivalry becomes an insignificant feature, and logical experimentation forms the central interest. Just so with the common and often ancient mechanical and mathematical puzzles. Pleasure in conquering their logical difficulties is derived from the gratification of a “general impulse or general instinct to exercise the intelligence as such.”[336] Causality plays a prominent part in poetry, too, since we require it to reveal to us the inner relations of the events set forth and to exhibit cause and effect in clearer and more orderly sequence than the complexities of reality admit of.[337] Especially is this the case with tragedy. In my Einleitung in die Aesthetik I expressed the opinion that the treatment of tragical climaxes as logical necessities is an important means of bracing us for the increasingly painful inner imitation which is so essential, without weakening or modifying its effect. “When the course of the tragic tale is so far developed as to suggest that a catastrophe is imminent, it should also appear inevitable. Stern necessity must urge the hero toward the fearful goal so persistently that escape shall be unthinkable, a logical impossibility. This feeling of necessity is calculated to fix the æsthetic illusion, and consequently help on the effect by rendering more strenuous the mental tension and directing it so forcibly toward the climax that consciousness is a captive to inner imitation until the tragedy has culminated. In other words, fear of the catastrophe is so absorbing as to create the illusion that the apprehended event is just at hand, and consequently all sense of the painfulness of the situation is merged in the stress of this illusion, since it alone is competent to relieve the tension.”[338] I might have continued to the effect that such manifestations of the law of cause afford us a positive logical satisfaction, and in spite of the impression forced upon us by the crushing blows of Fate, weave some