Man's supreme inheritance : conscious guidance and control in relation to human evolution in civilization / by F. Matthias Alexander ; with an introductory word by Professor John Dewey.

  • Alexander, F. Matthias (Frederick Matthias), 1869-1955.
Date:
[1918], ©1918
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man's supreme inheritance : conscious guidance and control in relation to human evolution in civilization / by F. Matthias Alexander ; with an introductory word by Professor John Dewey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    efficient. The usual procedure is to instruct the pupil, who is either sitting or lying on the floor, to relax, or to do what he or she understands by relaxing. The result is invariably collapse. For relaxation really means a due tension of the parts of the muscular system intended by nature to be constantly more or less tensed, together with ings the position of mechanical advantage.1 But apart from an incorrect understanding of the proper condition natural to the various muscles, the theory of relaxation, like that of the rest cure, makes a wrong assumption, and if either system is persisted in, there must inevitably follow a general lowering of vitality which will be felt the moment regular duties are taken up again, and which will soon bring about the return of the old troubles in an exaggerated form. The last remedy mentioned at the opening of this chapter was ‘deep-breathing.’ This is a later form of ‘ physical-culture ’ development, and is, in effect, a modi- fication in the right direction. It is the logical outcome of the perception that strenuous, forcing, muscular exercises were resulting in new and possibly greater evils than those they professed to cure. ‘ Deep-breathing ’ is indeed a step in the right direction, but only a step, because, while it does not always do serious harm and in some instances, perhaps, a certain amount of good, it does not go to the root of the matter, the eradication of defects, nor does it take cog- nizance of the most important factor in the scheme of physical co-ordination. What that radical factor is I shall explain in detail in my next chapter, but I will first briefly review the chief points of the argument as far as it has been unfolded. ~ In imagination we have seen man through the darkness which covers his first appearance on the earth, the early Miocene man. As we have pictured him, he was a creature of simple needs and of a vigorous bodily habit, an animal in all save that spark of self-consciousness which burned feebly in his primitive, but increasing and differentiating brain. 1 See Part 11., p: 128.