Orpheus; or, The music of the futureTurner, W. J. (Walter James)
Philosophy
Orpheus; or, The music of the future
Turner, W. J. (Walter James)
Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics
All life moves in rhythm. We know to-day that the old distinctions
between spirit and matter are superficial. When I was a student at
the School of Mines at the age of seventeen, learning organic and
inorganic chemistry, we were taught Mendeléeff’s Law which showed that
all the elements were multiples of a common denominator, the atom;
and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being
the smallest possible bit of matter, finite and irreducible, it is a
solar system--its sun and planets being bits of positive and negative
electricity. All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth
century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot
as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds
like our feet need a solid something beneath them. It is paralysing to
conceive that the floor we stand upon, the chair we sit upon, consist
solely of rotating electrical forces, but when we think of “bits”
welded together we feel safe again, although actually these “bits” are
a pure mental fiction, and what we stand and sit upon is _motion_. If
the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit, the famous
vacuum abhorred of Nature (alias Tophet in biblical language).
My chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at
the bottom of their inorganic and organic chemistry there was nothing
but motion, as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think
that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but
love. They imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with
an infinite chasm between them. They thought that inorganic chemistry
was absolutely different from organic chemistry, although of course
they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove
their belief--but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their
beliefs. Neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain
anything. One was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole
what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole. Those of us who had
this parrot-like faculty became in our turn Professors of Chemistry and
of Music.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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