to "help";
they are anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect
external changes: setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for
animals, etc. In their plays, they like to construct their own toys and
appliances. With increasing maturity, activity which does not give back
results of tangible and visible achievement loses its interest. Play
then changes to fooling and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing.
Observable results are necessary to enable persons to get a sense and
a measure of their own powers. When make-believe is recognized to be
make-believe, the device of making objects in fancy alone is too easy
to stimulate intense action. One has only to observe the countenance of
children really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious
absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease to
afford adequate stimulation.

When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and
enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into
work. Like play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in
that activity is subordinated to an external result, but in the fact
that a longer course of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result.
The demand for continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence
must be shown in selecting and shaping means. To extend this account
would be to repeat what has been said under the caption of aim,
interest, and thinking. It is pertinent, however, to inquire why the
idea is so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an
ulterior material result. The extreme form of this subordination,
namely drudgery, offers a clew. Activity carried on under conditions
of external pressure or coercion is not carried on for any significance
attached to the doing. The course of action is not intrinsically
satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining
some reward at its conclusion. What is inherently repulsive is endured
for the sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a
gain hitched on by others. Under unfree economic conditions, this state
of affairs is bound to exist. Work or industry offers little to engage
the emotions and the imagination; it is a more or less mechanical series
of strains. Only the hold which the completion of the work has upon
a person will keep him going. But the end should be intrinsic to the
action; it should be its end--a part of its own c