The (Platonic) Ideas are the adequate objectification of will. To excite
or suggest the knowledge of these by means of the representation of
particular things (for works of art themselves are always representations
of particular things) is the end of all the other arts, which can only be
attained by a corresponding change in the knowing subject. Thus all these
arts objectify the will indirectly only by means of the Ideas; and since
our world is nothing but the manifestation of the Ideas in multiplicity,
though their entrance into the _principium individuationis_ (the form of
the knowledge possible for the individual as such), music also, since it
passes over the Ideas, is entirely independent of the phenomenal world,
ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist if there was no
world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts. Music is as _direct_
an objectification and copy of the whole _will_ as the world itself, nay,
even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of
individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy
of the Ideas, but the _copy of the will itself_, whose objectivity the
Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and
penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows,
but it speaks of the thing itself. Since, however, it is the same will
which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite
different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a
parallel, an analogy, between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in
multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world. The establishing of
this analogy will facilitate, as an illustration, the understanding of
this exposition, which is so difficult on account of the obscurity of the
subject.