The second remark relates to the pleasurable quality of games involving
use of the reasoning faculty. We have already shown that play with
reason takes the form of experimentation with imagination and the other
intellectual faculties in their capacity of illusion workers as well
as in their more constructive activity; now we find further that its
recreative effect is much greater than is realized during the progress
of the game, and that the consciousness of standing voluntarily in a
world of our own creation may be a feature in the interest excited
by the game.[402] The chief source of satisfaction, however, is
enjoyment of the fight, in the playful intellectual duel, where bold
attack and skilful parry, systematic advance and stubborn resistance,
crafty manœuvring and direct assault, single combat and the general
skirmish, as well as pursuit and demolition, succeed one another in
ever-renewed combinations. In those games which add the charm of
uncertainty to the mental contest the effect is of course still more
complicated. As I shall have occasion later to speak exhaustively
of games of chance, I confine myself here to Lazarus’s significant
conclusion from the union of these contrasted forces. “That men, and,
indeed, the same man can take pleasure in such opposite and absolutely
contradictory principles of play seems wonderful, and yet it is most
natural, for both are elements of human nature grounded in the very
essence of his being and the normal manner of using his powers. In
his serious, moral life, directed by the mandates of duty, he is also
controlled by two contrary forces, freedom and necessity. He must bow
to Fate and yet strive and struggle for what is his own. He expends
his energies according to his own behests, and must then await success
and reward till the turn of Fortune’s wheel. Both disappointment and
struggle, receiving and expending, suffering and toiling, are woven
into the texture of his life and character, and become the sources of
his volition as well as the arbiters of his fortune. He obeys both
forces; to pursue and hold to what is good is his dual impulse, both in
life and in play.”[403]
3. _Physical Rivalry_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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