Quote of the Day

Just as the results of that primitive process of mental digestion, verbal symbolism, may be used for the satisfaction of other needs than symbolization, so all other instinctive acts may serve the expressive function. Eating, traveling, asking or answering questions, construction, destruction, prostitution—any or all such activities may enter into rites; yet rites in themselves are not practical, but expressive. Ritual, like art, is essentially the active termination of a symbolic transformation of experience. It is born in the cortex, not in the “old brain”; but it is born of an elementary need of that organ, once the organ has grown to human estate.

—Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key