The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life  is a painting by Edvard Munch, 1900.

It is also a book written by Havelock Ellis in 1923.

...it is necessary to insist upon life as a dance. This is not a mere metaphor. 

The dance is the rule of number and of rhythm and of measure and of order, of the controlling influence of form, of the subordination of the parts to the whole.
That is what a dance is. And these same properties also make up the classic 
spirit, not only in life, but, still more clearly and definitely, in the universe itself. We are strictly correct when we regard not only life but the universe as a dance. For the universe is made up of a certain number of elements, less than a hundred, and the "periodic law" of these elements is metrical. They are ranged, that is to say, not haphazard, not in groups, but by number, and those of like
quality appear at fixed and regular intervals.  Thus our world is, even 
fundamentally, a dance, a single metrical stanza in a poem which will be for ever hidden from us, except in so far as the philosophers, who are to-day even here 
applying the methods of mathematics, may believe that they have imparted to it 
the character of objective knowledge.