Humans possess the ability to speak, yet their rituals include acts as well as utterances, and in many of them special objects and substances are used or manipulated. Even rituals conducted in solitude often require the assumption of special postures, the performance of stereotyped movements or the manipulation of special paraphernalia and, like public rituals, they are often performed in special places at special times. We have a vision, all the more true for being idealized, of children reciting their daily prayers not anywhere at any time, but kneeling, eyes closed and hands clasped, by their beds at the very end of their day, and orthodox Jews bind phylacterie to their arms and foreheads before morning prayer even when they are alone. Physical display is a wide-spread, if not universal, aspect of solitary as well as public ritual, and it is plausible to take it to be an aspect, and an important one, of ritual's self-informing operation.

To note that physical acts and material objects and substances are components of virtually all human rituals is hardly to account for such a fact. Physical display in ritual may, of course, be archaic. In their use of posture and movement the rituals of humans come closest to those of the speechless beasts, and it may be that the material aspect of human ritual survives from a time when our forebears were without language. But to suggest that something is a survival is not to account for why it should have survived.