as we find in the later religions
and the 'Churches' (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian, or
what-not), and yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely and was
urged, almost compelled, to their utterance in some form or other. And
so it came about that people expressed themselves in a vast mass of
ritual and myth--customs, ceremonies, legends, stories--which on account
of their popular and concrete form were handed down for generations, and
some of which linger on still in the midst of our modern civilization.
These rituals and legends were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling
and childish in character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave
the expression needed; and some of them of course, as we have seen, were
full of meaning and suggestion.

A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours, in which
(notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic sense is greatly
lacking, or at any rate but little diffused, does not as a rule
understand that poetic RITES, in the evolution of peoples, came
naturally before anything like ordered poems or philosophy or
systematized VIEWS about life and religion--such as WE love to wallow
in! Things were FELT before they were spoken. The loading of diseases
into disease-boats, of sins onto scape-goats, the propitiation of the
forces of nature by victims, human or animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of
re-birth, eucharistic feasts, sexual communions, orgiastic celebrations
of the common life, and a host of other things--all SAID plainly enough
what was meant, but not in WORDS. Partly no doubt it was that at some
early time words were more difficult of command and less flexible in use
than actions (and at all times are they not less expressive?). Partly it
was that mankind was in the child-stage. The Child delights in ritual,
in symbol, in expression through material objects and actions:

See, at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart.

And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in ritual
celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but little
understand; for these had then his heart.

One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING. Children
dance instinctively. They dance with rage; they dance with joy, with
sheer vital