It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier between religious and artistic expression-languages and pure communication-languages. This is true also (and indeed specially) of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to "say" something that he could have said equally well or better in an exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct, warn, or improve — the picture-series in any Greek Orthodox church, which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says nothing; or Hogarth's substitute for sermons; or, for that matter, even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by the performance before one's eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression-language should in no wise be a communication-language, and the phenomenon of priesthood is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language in which man can communicate with God.
All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of Waking-Being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye), holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech in general — indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring. But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above the tree- top — or something of religious world-feeling in the song of the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and tension, form an uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms of every modern Civilization.
And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of research — "totem" and "taboo." The more enigmatic and indefinable these words became, the more it was felt that in them we were touching upon an ultimate life-basis which was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as the result of the above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us.
