Note 23 — Chapter IV · The Positive Man and the Positive Woman

I feel I must offer some explanation here in regard to the precise relationship of the social instinct to order. Some will object, and quite rightly, that all order is not social order, and that all rhythm is not gregarious rhythm. There is the natural rhythm (and therefore the natural order) of birds’ songs, of insects’ buzzing, of horses’ and most animals’ movements, of fish in water, of corn waving in the wind. Whatever be the strength or weakness of our social tendencies, therefore, we must, as animals, feel instinctively and deeply akin to the phenomenon of rhythm and its charm. This affinity will reside deep down in our natures, and will hark back to an age far more remote than that in which the first human society was formed. All this is perfectly true. But this very phenomenon of natural rhythm, extended into the general notion of order, is the only origin to which we can possibly trace the power of rhythmic or orderly arrangement in the creative human being. Extended into the notion of order and applied creatively by a superior human being to Nature, whereby chaos becomes arrangement, and confusion is unravelled, this rhythm constitutes the birth not only of all human society, but of each separate civilization that has ever existed. In this way I conceive of the social instinct having, as a product of natural rhythm and order, engulfed and absorbed the source of its existence, in the human kind, and established itself in humanity as the developed and highly extended form of that source.