In discussions on such primitive rites as "Carrying out the Death," "Bringing in Summer," we are often told that the puppet of the girl is carried round, buried, burnt; brought back, because it "personifies the Spirit of Vegetation," or it "embodies the Spirit of Summer." The Spirit of Vegetation is "incarnate in the puppet." We are led, by this way of speaking, to suppose that the savage or the villager first forms an idea or conception of a Spirit of Vegetation and then later "embodies" it. We naturally wonder that he should perform a mental act so high and difficult as abstraction. A very little consideration shows that he performs at first no abstraction at all; abstraction is foreign to his mental habit. He begins with a vague excited dance to relieve his emotion. That dance has, probably almost from the first, a leader; the dancers choose an actual _person_, and he is the root and ground of _personification_. There is nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not "embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From his personality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without _per_ception there is no _con_ception. We noted in speaking of dances (p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations of actual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and the war dance. So, from many actual living personal May Queens and Deaths, from many actual men and women decked with leaves, or trees dressed up as men and women, arises _the_ Tree Spirit, _the_ Vegetation Spirit, _the_ Death. At the back, then, of the fact of personification lies the fact that the emotion is felt collectively, the rite is performed by a band or chorus who dance together _with a common leader_. Round that leader the emotion centres. When there is an act of Carrying-out or Bringing-in he either is himself the puppet or he carries it. Emotion is of the whole band; drama--doing--tends to focus on the leader. This leader, this focus, is then remembered, thought of, imaged; from being _per_ceived year by year, he is finally _con_ceived; but his basis is always in actual fact of which he is but the reflection. Had there been no periodic festivals, personification might long have halted. But it is easy to see that a recurrent _per_ception helps to form a permanent abstract _con_ception. The different actual recurrent May Kings and "Deaths," _because they recur_, get a sort of permanent life of their own and become beings apart. In this way a conception, a kind of _daimon_, or spirit, is fashioned, who dies and lives again in a perpetual cycle. The periodic festival begets a kind of not immortal, but perennial, god.