it is, psychologists tell us, just in this interval, this space between perception and reaction, this momentary halt, that all our mental life, our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion and our art, is built up.  If the cycle of knowing, feeling, acting, were instantly fulfilled, that is, if we were a mass of well-contrived instincts, we should hardly have dromena, and we should certainly never pass from dromena to drama.  Art and religion, though perhaps not wholly ritual, spring from the incomplete cycle, from unsatisfied desire, from perception and emotion that have somehow not found immediate outlet in practical action.  When we come later to establish the dividing line between art and ritual we shall find this fact to be cardinal.

We have next to watch how out of representation repeated there grows up a kind of abstraction which helps the transition from ritual to art.  When the men of a tribe return from a hunt, a journey, a battle, or any event that has caused them keen and pleasant emotion, they will often re-act their doings round the camp-fire at night to an attentive audience of women and young boys.  The cause of this world-wide custom is no doubt in great part the desire to repeat a pleasant experience; the battle or the hunt will not be re-enacted unless it has been successful.  Together with this must be reckoned a motive seldom absent from human endeavour, the desire for self-exhibition, self-enhancement.  But in this re-enactment, we see at once, lies the germ of history and of commemorative ceremonial, and also, oddly enough, an impulse emotional in itself begets a process we think of as characteristically and exclusively intellectual, the process of abstraction.  The savage begins with the particular battle that actually did happen; but, it is easy to see that if he re-enacts it again and again the particular battle or hunt will be forgotten, the representation cuts itself loose from the particular action from which it arose, and becomes generalized, as it were abstracted.  Like children he plays not at a funeral, but at “funerals,” not at a battle, but at battles; and so arises the war-dance, or the death-dance, or the hunt-dance.  This will serve to show how inextricably the elements of knowing and feeling are intertwined.

So, too, with the element of action.  If we consider the occasions when a savage dances, it will soon appear that it is not only after a battle or a hunt that he dances in order to commemorate it, but before.  Once the commemorative dance has got abstracted or generalized it becomes material for the magical dance, the dance pre-done.  A tribe about to go to war will work itself up by a war dance; about to start out hunting they will catch their game in pantomime.  Here clearly the main emphasis is on the practical, the active, doing-element in the cycle.  The dance is, as it were, a sort of precipitated desire, a discharge of pent-up emotion into action.