However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual, in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt, placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community, sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language. 'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became a most important part of ritual. (1) See ch. ix and xi. So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?