d competitive games are preferred;
and with boys, those games especially which demand an amount of strength
and skill. This preference is to be accounted for through the marked
development of the social instincts at this age and, in the case of
boys, through increase in strength and will power.

=Limitations of Play.=--Notwithstanding the value of play as an agent in
education, it is evident that its application in the school-room is
limited. Social efficiency demands that the child shall learn to
appreciate the joy of work even more than the joy of play. Moreover, as
noted in the early part of our work, the acquisition of race experience
demands that its problems be presented to the child in definite and
logical order. This can be accomplished only by having them presented to
the pupil by an educative agent and therefore set as a problem or a task
to be mastered. This, of course, does not deny that the teacher should
strive to have the pupil express himself as freely as possible as he
works at his school problem. It does necessitate, however, that the
child should find in his lesson some conscious end, or aim, to be
reached beyond the mere activity of the learning process. This in itself
stamps the ordinary learning process of the school as more than mere
play.

CHAPTER XXII

HABIT

=Nature of Habit.=--When an action, whether performed under the full
direction, or control, of attention and with a sense of effort, or
merely as an instinctive or impulsive act, comes by repetition to be
performed with such ease that consciousness may be largely diverted from
the act itself and given to other matters, the action is said to have
become habitual. For example, if a person attempts a new manner of
putting on a tie, it is first necessary for him to stand before a glass
and follow attentively every movement. In a short time, however, he
finds himself able to perform the act easily and skilfully both without
the use of a glass and almost without conscious direction. Moreover if
the person should chance in his first efforts to hold his arms and head
in a certain way in order to watch the process more easily in the glass,
it is found that when later he does the act even without the use of a
glass, he must still hold his arms and head in this manner.

=Basis of Habits.=--The ability of the organism to habituate an action,
or make it a reflex is found to depend upon certain properties of
nervous matter which have alread