often re-act their doings round the camp-fire at night to an attentive
audience of women and young boys. The cause of this world-wide custom is
no doubt in great part the desire to repeat a pleasant experience; the
battle or the hunt will not be re-enacted unless it has been successful.
Together with this must be reckoned a motive seldom absent from human
endeavour, the desire for self-exhibition, self-enhancement. 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.