Ancient Art and Ritual | Page 9

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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.
A more fruitful way of looking at our human constitution is to see it,
not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a sort of continuous cycle of
activities. What really happens is, putting it very roughly, something of
this sort. To each one of us the world is, or seems to be, eternally
divided into two halves. On the one side is ourself, on the other all the
rest of things. All our action, our behaviour, our life, is a relation
between these two halves, and that behaviour seems to have three, not
divisions, but stages. The outside world, the other half, the object if we
like so to call it, acts upon us, gets at us through our senses. We hear or
see or taste or feel something; to put it roughly, we perceive something,
and as we perceive it, so, instantly, we feel about it, towards it, we have
emotion. And, instantly again, that emotion becomes a motive-power,
we _re_-act towards the object that got at us, we want to alter it or our
relation to it. If we did not perceive we should not feel, if we did not
feel we should not act. When we talk--as we almost must talk--of
Reason, the Emotions, or the Passions and the Will leading to action,

we think of the three stages or aspects of our behaviour as separable
and even perhaps hostile; we want, perhaps, to purge the intellect from
all infection of the emotions. But in reality, though at a given moment
one or the other element, knowing, feeling, or acting, may be dominant
in our consciousness, the rest are always immanent.
When we think of the three elements or stages, knowing, feeling,
striving, as all being necessary factors in any complete bit of human
behaviour, we no longer try to arrange them in a hierarchy with
knowing or reason at the head. Knowing--that is, receiving and
recognizing a stimulus from without--would seem to come first; we
must be acted on before we can _re_-act; but priority confers no
supremacy. We can look at it another way. Perceiving is the first rung
on the ladder that leads to action, feeling is the second, action is the
topmost rung, the primary goal, as it were, of all the climbing. For the
purpose of our discussion this is perhaps the simplest way of looking at
human behaviour.
* * * * *
Movement, then, action, is, as it were, the goal and the end of thought.
Perception finds its natural outlet and completion in doing. But here
comes in a curious consideration important for our purpose. In animals,
in so far as they act by "instinct," as we say, perception, knowing, is
usually followed immediately and inevitably by doing, by such doing
as is calculated to conserve the animal and his species; but in some of
the higher animals, and especially in man, where the nervous system is
more complex, perception is not instantly transformed into action; there
is an interval for choice between several possible actions. Perception is
pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious representation.
Now 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