as something meant to be understood by another and to
produce changes in his disposition and behaviour, but language has
pre-rational uses, of which poetry and prayer are perhaps the chief. A
man overcome by passion assumes dramatic attitudes surely not intended
to be watched and interpreted; like tears, gestures may touch an
observer's heart, but they do not come for that purpose. So the fund of
words and phrases latent in the mind flow out under stress of emotion;
they flow because they belong to the situation, because they fill out
and complete a perception absorbing the mind; they do not flow primarily
to be listened to. The instinct to pray is one of the chief avenues to
the deity, and the form prayer takes helps immensely to define the power
it is addressed to; indeed, it is in the act of praying that men
formulate to themselves what God must be, and tell him at great length
what they believe and what they expect of him. The initial forms of
prayer are not so absurd as the somewhat rationalised forms of it.
Unlike sacrifice, prayer seems to be justified by its essence and to be
degraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men try
to find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence is
poetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and more
nonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercial
exchange of views between two interlocutors.

Prayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and being
furthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to in
their impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, to
contrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly as
likely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be to
chastise one's self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or to
perform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, and
as such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one which
may be accepted instead, very often ensues; and it is then that
mythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery of
divine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced.

[Sidenote: Its supposed efficacy magical.]

Magic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic that
succeeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic is
never appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated man
prays to