on. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts
slowly and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially
useful or purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of
life; the instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective
complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.

The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend
of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the
life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or
futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently
supervenes a revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be
avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected
purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports--hunting, angling,
athletic games, and the like--afford an exercise for dexterity and for
the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life.
So long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or
with a sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life
is substantially a life of naive impulsive action--so long the immediate
and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons
of decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment
holds its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous
recreation. In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise
are morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of recreation
under existing circumstances.

But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
development. They not o