The distinction is one of high importance, but for the moment what concerns us is, to see the common factor in the two sets of acts, what is indeed their source and mainspring.  In the case of the girl dancing in the hoop and leaping out of it there is no doubt.  The words she says, “Flax, grow,” prove the point.  She does what she wants done.  Her intense desire finds utterance in an act.  She obeys the simplest possible impulse.  Let anyone watch an exciting game of tennis, or better still perhaps a game of billiards, he will find himself doing in sheer sympathy the thing he wants done, reaching out a tense arm where the billiard cue should go, raising an unoccupied leg to help the suspended ball over the net.  Sympathetic magic is, modern psychology teaches us, in the main and at the outset, not the outcome of intellectual illusion, not even the exercise of a “mimetic instinct,” but simply, in its ultimate analysis, an utterance, a discharge of emotion and longing.

But though the utterance of emotion is the prime and moving, it is not the sole, factor.  We may utter emotion in a prolonged howl, we may even utter it in a collective prolonged howl, yet we should scarcely call this ritual, still less art.  It is true that a prolonged collective howl will probably, because it is collective, develop a rhythm, a regular recurrence, and hence probably issue in a kind of ritual music; but for the further stage of development into art another step is necessary.  We must not only utter emotion, we must represent it, that is, we must in some way reproduce or imitate or express the thought which is causing us emotion.  Art is not imitation, but art and also ritual frequently and legitimately contain an element of imitation.  Plato was so far right.  What exactly is imitated we shall see when we come to discuss the precise difference between art and ritual.

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The Greek word for a rite as already noted is dromenon, “a thing done”—­and the word is full of instruction.  The Greek had realized that to perform a rite you must do something, that is, you must not only feel something but express it in action, or, to put it psychologically, you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it.  The word for rite, dromenon, “thing done,” arose, of course, not from any psychological analysis, but from the simple fact that rites among the primitive Greeks were things done, mimetic dances and the like.  It is a fact of cardinal importance that their word for theatrical representation, drama, is own cousin to their word for rite, dromenon; drama also means “thing done.”  Greek linguistic instinct pointed plainly to the fact that art and ritual are near relations.  To this fact of crucial importance for our argument we shall return later.  But from the outset it should be borne in mind that in these two Greek words, dromenon and drama, in their exact meaning, their relation and their distinction, we have the keynote and clue to our whole discussion.