ent. 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.

In both these kinds of dances, the dance that commemorates by
_re_-presenting and the dance that anticipates by _pre_-presenting,
Plato would have seen the element of imitation, what the Greeks called
_mimesis_, which we saw he believed to be the very source and essence of
all art. In a sense he would have been right. The commemorative dance
does especially _re_-present; it reproduces the past hunt or battle; but
if we analyse a little more closely we see it is not for the sake of
copying the actual battle itself, but for the _emotion felt about the
battle_. This they desire to re-live. The emotional element is seen
still more clearly in the dance _fore_-done for magical purposes.
Success in war or in the hunt is keenly, intensely desired. The hunt or
the battle cannot take place at the moment, so the cycle cannot complete
itself. The desire cannot find utterance in the actual act; it grows and
accumulates by inhibition, till at last the exasp