most opposed to,
practical life, and the tendency to explain its gratuitous existence
by a special "play instinct" more gratuitous itself, are due in great
measure to our wrong way of thinking and feeling upon no less a matter
than human activity as such. The old-fashioned psychology which,
ignoring instinct and impulse, explained all action as the result of
a kind of calculation of future pleasure and pain, has accustomed us
to account for all fruitful human activity, whatever we call _work_,
by a wish for some benefit or fear of some disadvantage. And, on the
other hand, the economic systems of our time (or, at all events, the
systematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermore
accustomed us to think of everything like _work_ as done under
compulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken as
a postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or do
anything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the sense
of _wanting to do or make that thing_, but of _wanting to have or be
able to do something else_. Hence everything which is manifestly done
from no such motive, but from an inner impulse towards the doing,
comes to be thought of as opposed to _work_, and to be designated as
_play_. Now art is very obviously carried on for its own sake:
experience, even of our mercantile age, teaches that if a man does not
paint a picture or compose a symphony from an inner necessity as
disinterested as that which makes another man look at the picture or
listen to the symphony, no amount of self-interest, of disadvantages
and advantages, will enable him to do either otherwise than badly.
Hence, as I said, we are made to think of art as _play_, or a kind of
play.

But play itself, being unaccountable on the basis of external
advantage and disadvantage, being, from the false economic point of
view, unproductive, that is to say, pure waste, has in its turn to be
accounted for by the supposition of surplus energy occasionally
requiring to be let off to no purpose, or merely to prevent the
machine from bursting. This opposition of work and play is founded in
our experience of a social state which is still at sixes and sevens;
of a civilisation so imperfectly developed and organised that the
majority does nothing save under compulsion, and the minority does
nothing to any purpose; and where that little boy's Scylla and
Charybdis _all work_ and _all play_ is effectually realised in a
ni