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For the moment we have to note that the Greek word for rite, dromenon, “thing done,” is not strictly adequate.  It omits a factor of prime importance; it includes too much and not enough.  All “things done” are not rites.  You may shrink back from a blow; that is the expression of an emotion, that is a reaction to a stimulus, but that is not a rite.  You may digest your dinner; that is a thing done, and a thing of high importance, but it is not a rite.

One element in the rite we have already observed, and that is, that it be done collectively, by a number of persons feeling the same emotion.  A meal digested alone is certainly no rite; a meal eaten in common, under the influence of a common emotion, may, and often does, tend to become a rite.

Collectivity and emotional tension, two elements that tend to turn the simple reaction into a rite, are—­specially among primitive peoples—­closely associated, indeed scarcely separable.  The individual among savages has but a thin and meagre personality; high emotional tension is to him only caused and maintained by a thing felt socially; it is what the tribe feels that is sacred, that is matter for ritual.  He may make by himself excited movements, he may leap for joy, for fear; but unless these movements are made by the tribe together they will not become rhythmical; they will probably lack intensity, and certainly permanence.  Intensity, then, and collectivity go together, and both are necessary for ritual, but both may be present without constituting art; we have not yet touched the dividing line between art and ritual.  When and how does the dromenon, the rite done, pass over into the drama?

The genius of the Greek language felt, before it consciously knew, the difference.  This feeling ahead for distinctions is characteristic of all languages, as has been well shown by Mr. Pearsall Smith[6] in another manual of our series.  It is an instinctive process arising independently of reason, though afterwards justified by it.  What, then, is the distinction between art and ritual which the genius of the Greek language felt after, when it used the two words dromenon and drama for two different sorts of “things done”?  To answer our question we must turn for a brief moment to psychology, the science of human behaviour.

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We are accustomed for practical convenience to divide up our human nature into partitions—­intellect, will, the emotions, the passions—­with further subdivisions, e.g. of the intellect into reason, imagination, and the like.  These partitions we are apt to arrange into a sort of order of merit or as it is called a hierarchy, with Reason as head and crown, and under her sway the emotions and passions.  The result of establishing this hierarchy is that the impulsive side of our nature comes off badly, the passions and even the emotions lying under a certain ban.  This popular psychology is really a convenient and perhaps indispensable mythology.  Reason, the emotions, and the will have no more separate existences than Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.