Education Quote by Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis writes like a dancer who’s had to justify movement in a culture that kept trying to turn the body into a problem. Calling the body a "receiving and transmitting station" borrows the modern thrill of early radio and electricity, then flips it into spiritual tech: we’re not souls stuck in flesh; we’re instruments. That metaphor matters because it gives dance a moral and even civic function. If bodies can "receive" life and "transmit" it onward, then training the body isn’t vanity or spectacle - it’s a discipline of perception.

The phrase "highest wisdom" is doing strategic work. St. Denis isn’t just praising fitness; she’s elevating bodily practice to the status usually reserved for doctrine. In the early 20th century, modern dance was fighting for legitimacy against ballet’s aristocratic rules and against American prudishness that treated female performers as suspect. Her solution was to sacralize embodiment: make responsiveness to "nature. art and religion" a single continuum. The odd, compressed ending reads like a manifesto in shorthand, as if these domains are no longer separable once you take the body seriously.

Subtextually, there’s a quiet rebellion here: knowledge doesn’t arrive only through books, pulpits, or studios; it arrives through sensation, rhythm, breath, attention. Train the body, and you change what you’re able to notice - and what you’re able to express. St. Denis is arguing for an ethics of sensitivity, where culture isn’t imposed on the body so much as conducted through it.