They smiled at the clumsy methods of resting that Western civilisation had adopted, the awkward, unyielding beds and chairs and sofas, and the wasteful and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give rest. Ages ago they had banished dancing and all corybantic amusements as extravagant waste of tissue, destroying a hundred cells or nerves for every one that they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent exercise encouraged the animal part at the expense of the progressive: it mangled and rent the delicate tissues of the brain and heart, and sent the currents of sustenance into the muscles and bones of the legs and arms. The riding and hunting and athletics of the aristocracies only helped the animal to persist, and clearly identified their ancestry with the conquering nomad hordes that swept down on the peaceful plains and destroyed primitive civilisations. Exercise, they held, should help, on the one hand, to increase the store of energy to be transformed into the higher elements, and on the other to rest the spiritual forces and faculties. Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the prolongation of life. There was a latent passion in living things for rest: and this rose to its highest in man. To balk it was to shorten the career of all the powers. And they had set themselves to understand this passion and the methods for its satisfaction as one of the first duties of an advancing people. They knew that there never could be any complete rest for a living system short of death. Even in the soundest sleep the functions proceeded, though feebly, and there was a misty consciousness of existence; else it would lapse into annihilation. They realised that they must provide for many gradations of rest between the edge of death and the borderland of full activity. Nor should any portion or element of the human system go long without its period of rest and its period of exercise. On these principles they built their methods of alternating rest and activity, all duly subordinated to their great aim,--the advance of the higher nature. The only reason for muscular pursuits was that the intellect and the imagination might be relaxed and the higher energy reinforced. Even the loftiest thought resulted in certain waste products, that, if left to accumulate, would soon clog and stifle it. This waste must be carried off by reposeful exercise of the lower and more physical organs. All the lower elements which remain to mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease to be needed as regenerators of energy grow at once poisonous and must be removed by exercise.