Contradiction is another form of opposition. I once snapped the fingers of my four-year-old nephew, Heinrich K., for some misbehaviour. After he had been quiet for a while, as was his habit, this dialogue passed between us, evidently soon becoming playful to the child: “Uncle, I’ll shut you up in a room so you can never get out.” “Oh, I’ll climb out of a window.” “Then I will shut the blinds.” “But I will open them.” “But I’ll nail them shut.” “Then I’ll saw a hole in the door.” “But I’ll have an iron door, very strong.” “Then I’ll make a hole in the floor.” “But I will go underneath and make iron walls to the whole house.” And so it went on until I gave up the struggle with childish inventiveness. Enjoyment of such playful dispute often lasts a lifetime. As a fourteen-year-old boy I once argued for hours with a friend as to whether the beauty of colour was relative or absolute. One of us contended that a blue embroidered chair might be positively ugly, however attractive the colour, while the other maintained that the beauty of the blue would make the chair admirable. I mention this trivial example only because it shows so plainly the playful character of such talk, for without any personal interest in the matter we waxed warm over our respective views and presented them with great energy. The heated discussion gave us quite as much satisfaction as solving the problem could have done; in fact, the charm of conversation is largely to be attributed to the enjoyment of disputation. On examining closely into what constitutes the attraction of such entertainment for us we find that besides relating and listening to anecdotes and gossip about acquaintances (this is also play) our chief pleasure is in more or less playful combating of opposite opinion. People who have no interest or talent for these three things are at a loss in society. We now take up such intellectual contests as are commonly included in the lists of fighting plays, including the solution of riddles, to which we alluded under experimentation. The measuring of mental readiness between individuals when the problem is given orally by a third person, and this is the original and natural method, is a genuine intellectual duel. It was a favourite entertainment of the ancient Germans which Rückert has celebrated in his beautiful poem. Another form is the putting of difficult questions alternately to opposed parties, as in our modern spelling bee. There are examples of this in the Eddas, such as the intellectual duels between Odin and a giant, and between Thor and the dwarf Alvis. Romantic troubadour songs belong here too. Uhland and Rückert once engaged in a metrical debate as to whether it is worse to find one’s lover dead or faithless. Uhland preferred death, while Rückert attempted to sustain the thesis “better false than dead.”[385] Rivalry is conspicuous in such contests, as we shall have occasion to note later.