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To the psychiatrist play derives its importance from the light it throws upon the individual's habits of mind. Any treatise, therefore, which undertakes to analyze the problem of playful activities should command his attention. The proud boast of this book is that it treats of it by means of quantitative measurement, the expressed implication being that this is the only scientific way—or one likely to yield an adequate understanding of it. This methodological fallacy, taken over from the sciences which have as their natural elements numerical relations or units, underlies the whole basis of the book. What is in this book actually dealt with is a phase of social psychology. This branch of it deals with individuals as they are stimulated to act (play, dance, sing, etc.) by social stimuli. In this instance, the play (type, popularity, seasonal occurrence, etc.) must be regarded as the reciprocal response phase of social stimuli. The authors seem dimly aware of this, as when they interpret certain play activities of negro children as functions of their social and economic status. Unfortunately, this implication forms only a brief lucid interval in the book, for too often such mystic entities as “inherited traits,” “inherent tendencies,” and “neural organizations” are conjured up as explanatory principles. Here, of course, nothing less would satisfy an objective psychology of play behavior than a complete and detailed study of those cultural and psychologic stimuli which make for a specific type of play-activity, and of which they are the reciprocal phases.
Thus in this type of study figures and percentages will have little or no value. No amount of figures and graphs (and this work boasts of many) will make up for the deficiencies which result through the neglect of one of the most important phases of the subject. Of this phase, that is, the stimulus phase of leisure time activity, they have considered only some of the grosser factors, such as age, sex, race, season, etc