Modern times, almost universal war, bewildering, activities, and the breakdown of political and social doctrines of every shade an direction, have magnified what has for long been growing more certain, that there is something essentially wrong with man and his civilization. While doctrines have stood aloof from the tests of reality, it has been assumed that somewhere amid conflicting views must be one or some that had within them the power to guide man to a more wholesome life and a happier civilization. Then present turmoil has seen the scaffoldings of the doctrines crash, and the disillusionment in specious policies has been made known to all. Politicians, sociologists, scientists, and the well-meaning generally have placed their hopes of a sounder and more reasoned future upon schemes of social and material amelioration. They have not taken account of the possibility that within man as he is at present constituted lies the means of his own failure as a creature and as an operator of his own civilization. It is true that many have hinted or seen dimly that man bad reached a stage at which either he had no hope but to fail and perish or he had to pass to a plane of new experience and greater consciousness.

Strangest of all in a strange world is that one man alone has seen that need, has observed the flaws in modern man so imperfectly evolved, and has devised a technique whereby man may evolve to that plane of greater consciousness without which he cannot hope to survive. This man is F. Matthias Alexander. Briefly, he saw, some forty years ago, what should have been evident to all had not our powers of observation been so debased that man is not an integrated creature, but a misdirected and misdirecting anomaly. He sought reasons, and found that man was not co-ordinated. He sought further to find indeed what co-ordination within the human creation was. Now, the definition of "co-ordinate" by the Imperial Dictionary is "to arrange a set of things each in its due and relative order." Alexander found, what appears very simple, that man consists of a neck, a head, a body, arms, and legs. His first problem was to decide what resolution of the creature would give these parts their due and relative order in use. He had no foreknowledge or any preconceptions, and to arrive at the truth he had to experiment upon the living, complete creature ­ man. He experimented upon himself, and he observed what flowed from his experiments. He found that to achieve order among the constituents of the human creature all faculties must conspire to yield priority to a certain relative direction of the head to the neck. When the neck yielded to the head the means-to-be-so-directed then other impulses disposed the structure of the back, and so the torso in subordinate but complementary design. He devised means so to direct the arms and legs that they would function harmoniously with the neck, the head, and the torso, and thus completed the co-ordinate whole.

Mr. Alexander refined and perfected his teaching technique based upon these discoveries. He views man, the pupil, as a tangled skein of impulses manifested in a misdirected musculature. He seeks amid the tangle, unravels the impulses and the disorder of misuse, and so releases impulses in their due and proper order of functioning. The pupil, a prey to faulty habit based upon faulty concepts of himself, can assist only by yielding to the expert guidance of Alexander's knowing hands. The process-which-is-yielding is achieved by inhibiting misdirections. Inhibition is an effortless experience; but in so far as it conflicts with all that the pupil holds most dear, that which he has been heretofore, it is an experience not readily embarked upon by many. To yield and to go on yielding while the new impulses which direct one part after another and at the same time all parts together are established demands time and growth. Curiously and fortunately enough there are positions or attitudes in which, without the conscious intention of the pupil, inhibition is expressed or projected. Alexander has discovered these positions, and makes use of them to teach his pupils with his skilful hands to forego faulty directions and misuse, and to acquire co-ordinate directions and improved use. Why these positions, under certain circumstances, should bring the advantage of making manifest just co-ordination cannot be said at present; but the subtle beauty of the manæuvres when seen in action is an achievement to marvel over.

By such indirect means as here indicated Alexander then composes his pupil as an expression of impulses in their due and proper order of functioning. The pupil is given repeated experiences of co-ordinate impulses, so that in time he becomes capable of projecting them himself. While the pupil projects directive impulses a new sense of himself is growing. This sense of himself, unlike his former sensory appreciation which has been jettisoned with his misuses, is an accurate measure of what is manifestly happening to his mechanism. By means of this re-education a pupil is charged with impulses flowing to direct the parts of his mechanism in just order ­ the neck thus, the head thus, the back thus, the arms thus, the legs thus. As these impulses flow and responding sensory impulses return an awareness of integration is born, and a new form of control of the human mechanism is at once the individual and his resource. The human being, so directed and co-ordinated, is no longer the unbalanced respondent to these stimuli, which are so much forces of evil, and which have been the task of all philosophies and the prophets to defeat. In the human being so directed all life and living is equated to the relatively simple needs of the co-ordinate creature, and the creature is truly wholesome. The perfectly co-ordinated man, in the Alexander sense, knows what he is doing, and, were several generations of such men created, the expectation of an ordered world would have a living basis.

Readers interested in the great discovery I have indicated are advised to read Mr. Alexander's three books in the order here printed Man's Supreme Inheritance, Constructive Conscious Control, and The Use of the Self, each published by Messrs. Methuen.