“All functions are cyclical, all growth rhythmical. All attention is intermittent, all movement recurrent. The seemingly disjunctive muscular acts emerging from human volition are executed by a rhythmically-functioning brain operation upon rhythmical automatically-contracting muscles. A smooth movement is merely a controlled tremor, just as courage is but a controlled fear. “
“Cyclical man is part of cyclical animal-kind, that emerged from the margin of the cyclical sea, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in every twenty-four hours. Our body-fluids and blood plasma, our sweat and tears are all transmuted salt sea-water. Our temperatures, like the tides, rise and fall diurnally.”
“The tides of the sea and their variations result from the monthly rhythm of the moon and the annual rhythm of the earth as they swim through space. From its aquatic beginning human evolution has been as much dependent upon these weekly, monthly, annual and other cosmic rhythms as upon the generally-recognized laws of gravity, conservation of energy and conservation of mass. The latter, in fact, are but aspects of the former.”
“No wonder then that every part and point of living nature is rhythmical, and that human acts approach perfection, when they display symmetry and rhythm in tune with the symmetry and rhythm of Nature.”
“Rhythm is the soul of walking, running and dancing, of every sport; it is the essence of speech, oratory, ritual, singing and music; it is the objective of every art whether vocal, corporeal, manual, pedal or mental. Equally inevitable are the ultimate rhuthms of economics, politics, religion, morals, philosophy, history and science.”
“As individuals we not only are the inheritors of an individual physical and mental make-up determined by biological evolution, but also are the products of evolving human society – members of a herd. Just as physical evolution and the life history have been stories of neural inhibition and mental deliberation super-imposed upon instinctive, emotional automatism; so too modern civilisation has been a process of orderly, intellectual organisation, gradually replacing chaotic, emotional blundering. While the process is far from complete its direction towards control through understanding is obvious, whether we consider the evolution of the individual or the course of social history. Science, knowledge, wisdom or understanding, whatever the term we use, is a matter of setting in order, controlling or organising human bodies, their activities, their emotions, and their ideals relative to their environment. To understand is to control.“
“We can no more liberate sex from intellectual control, than the earth can return to the same position in space she occupied millions of years ago.”
“Half of the world’s bitterness could be eliminated, if those who are tired and in need of rest, recognised their state and ejoyed the taking of respite at the time the body demands it.” On the contrary, these “he-men and He-women,” by over-taxing their strength, strain their cycle beyond the limits of its elasticity. “