modes of behavior, but to the play impulse, a non-specific emotional tendency. Play, due perhaps to the overflow of nervous energy, economically used by nature in the preliminary exercise of instincts prior to, or at other times than during their serious employment, is disinterested, implies absorbtion in the object for its own sake, and finds expression in rhythm, imitation of serious activities, and spontaneous manifestations of joy. Aesthetic appreciation seems to me to be simply the play impulse attaching to certain objects and activities which are no longer valuable in any of the ways heretofore treated in this paper.[1] The serious engagement in these had formerly involved social coöperation and large expression of the gregarious instinct and contagion of emotions. Strong ties of sympathy knit men and women together while they engaged in dance, song, drawing, decoration, recital, or mime, for religious, magical, or other serious purposes, and the social consciousness, thus heightened, became an incitement to continue these activities for the sake of the pleasure involved in them. Hence a new sentiment, the aesthetic sentiment, became attached to them. The aesthetic sentiment is more variable and unstable than the moral and religious sentiments because its values are ordinarily regarded less seriously—in other words, more playfully—and the social group accordingly does not exact complete conformity on the part of individuals to its standards and traditions in this sphere. The genesis of aesthetic categories, as Professor Tufts has shown, is a matter of social as opposed to individual psychology. However social their origin, these categories must in some way take root in the minds of the individuals of each generation. This is effected through the stimulation of the play impulse, an innate disposition.
6. The last set of values to be discovered are those connected with the self as a whole. While the mind, except when suffering from pathological dissociation, is in some sense an organic unity, the position here set forth has been that within this unity the instincts and other innate dispositions are not only distinguishable by the psychologist, but also are felt by the individual as different
- ↑ James H. Tufts, "The Genesis of the Aesthetic Categories" in the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, Vol. III.
