nd picks, the otter
slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant
fumbles ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about."[2] "The
most casual notice of the activities of a young child reveals a
ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects
are sucked, fingered and thumped; drawn and pushed, handled
and thrown."[3]

[Footnote 2: Hobhouse: _Mind in Evolution_, p. 195.]

[Footnote 3 Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 31.]

When vitality is at its height in the waking period of a
young child, its environment is a succession of stimulations to
activity. Man's "innate tendency to fool" is notorious, a
tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are
responded to, not as means to ends, not with reference to their
use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation.
Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any
provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant "physiological
uneasiness." The two-year-old is a mechanism that
simply must and will move about, make all kinds of superfluous
gestures and facial expressions, and random sounds, as
it were, just to get rid of its stored-up energy. Man's laziness
and inertia are not infrequently commented on by moralists,
but it is not laziness and inertia _per se_; certainly in normal
individuals in the temperate zone, to do _something_ most of their
waking time is a natural tendency and one intrinsically pleasant
to practice. That the tendency to be active should vary
in different individuals and at different times is, of course, as
important a fact as it is a familiar one. Some of the causes of
this variation will be noted in the succeeding.

In adult life for casual and random activity is substituted
activity directed by some end or purpose which determines
the responses called into play. Professional and business,
domestic and social enterprises and obligations take up most of
the adult's energy. The contrast between the play of the
child and the work of the adult is that in the case of the
former actions are done for their own sake; and in the latter
for some end. The child, we say, plays "for the fun of the
thing," the adult works for pay, for professional success, for
power, reputation, etc.

But even in the adult the desire for play powerfully persists.
Not all the grown-up's energy is absorbed in his work,
and even some types of work, like that of the poet or painter,
or the building-up of a great business organization