It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical significance, dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic significance. Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the dancer’s art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that in some respects it was more like the wrestler’s art. “I doubt not yet to make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky,” said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself possessed by the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same thing of his style, for to him the style and the man were one: “My style,” he wrote to his intimate friend Rohde, “is a dance.” “Every day I count wasted,” he said again, “in which there has been no dancing.” The dance lies at the beginning of art, and we find it also at the end. The first creators of civilisation were making the dance, and the philosopher of a later age, hovering over the dark abyss of insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles strained to the breaking point, still seems to himself to be weaving the maze of the dance. Footnote 12: It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has suggested (_Zoölogist_, December, 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds. Footnote 13: “Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (_Völkerpsychologie_, 3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.” Footnote 14: See an interesting essay in _The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays_, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918. Footnote 15: This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has become almost a commonplace since. Footnote 16: See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in Japan,” _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century. Footnote 17: I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, “The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” _The Quest_, October, 1910.