What is knowledge? And what is musical knowledge? The latter question is no doubt included in the former, but we shall see. We know by experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language. The alphabet as such has no longer any meaning, that is why it is possible to use it with meaning--in that form we call language. But, at the beginning, these perfectly conventionalized, perfectly meaningless symbols, A, B, C, D, etc., had each a meaning and a very definite meaning. And those series of meanings (which have now shrivelled into the scentless, savourless, unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the alphabet) precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other meanings. Their life was death to all other life and not until they were dead could others live. This strange phenomenon is an element in the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract, then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. Sentences die and become idioms, idioms ideas, ideas theories, theories philosophies and religions. Every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried. Then a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the words re-emerge in single units again, but with changed countenances and expressions, to begin a new series of death-and-life existence. But the letters themselves, of which all words are comprised, are finally and forever dead--which is another way of saying they are immortal; for they do not change as words change from one generation to another. The “o” in dog does not differ from the “o” in god because “o” has no longer individuality or meaning. What we call “knowledge” is that which has become fixed and immortal, that which has ceased to live and have being and is immutable. Obviously we cannot be said to know a thing which is susceptible of change, which may differ to-morrow from what it is to-day. Therefore we can only know what is unknowable, because we only know what does not exist. This is no empty paradox. It is not a play on the word “exist.” We may say we know the letters A, B, C, D, etc., because they are the same for everybody; but they are only the same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody. If I ask you what A means to you it is impossible for you to tell me, since it means no more to you than to me. A in itself is nothing, you can neither think it nor feel it, you can only state it, and so it is, as I have said, a fact. There are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute facts.