Ritual then involves _imitation_; but does not arise out of it. It
desires to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce an object. A rite is,
indeed, we shall later see (p. 42), a sort of stereotyped action, not
really practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, a
reminiscence or an anticipation of actual practical doing; it is fitly,
though not quite correctly, called by the Greeks a _dromenon_, "a thing
done."

At the bottom of art, as its motive power and its mainspring, lies, not
the wish to copy Nature or even improve on her--the Huichol Indian does
not vainly expend his energies on an effort so fruitless--but rather an
impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to
give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or
doing or enriching the object or act desired. The common source of the
art and ritual of Osiris is the intense, world-wide desire that the life
of Nature which seemed dead should live again. This common _emotional_
factor it is that makes art and ritual in their beginnings well-nigh
indistinguishable. Both, to begin with, copy an act, but not at first
for the sake of the copy. Only when the emotion dies down and is
forgotten does the copy become an end in itself, a mere mimicry.

It is this downward path, this sinking of making to mimicry, that makes
us now-a-days think of ritual as a dull and formal thing. Because a rite
has ceased to be believed in, it does not in the least follow that it
will cease to be _done_. We have to reckon with all the huge forces of
habit. The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightest
impulse tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not only
others but ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the
act is dead; and then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, it