fledged music, and the additional element of harmony renders it more complex and more beautiful. Harmony, however, like rhythm and pitch, can be expressed in numbers. The beauty of harmony consists in a certain regularity of arithmetical proportions among the numbers of the various air-vibrations.

There is a peculiarity about music which is that a musician need know nothing about the physical conditions and arithmetical relations, for he perceives them directly and immediately. Music is, so to say, an intuition of the ear. It is the cognisance of a world of most delicate phenomena anterior to any reasoning or mental comprehension. The ear feels the consonances and dissonances in all their details without having any idea of the nature of their general cause.

Among the few philosophers who have discussed music Schopenhauer's theory deserves to be specially mentioned, in so far as he has exercised an uncommon influence upon the musical development of modern times. Wagner is one of Schopenhauer's most faithful disciples, who, in his greatest dramatic work, the trilogy of the Nibelungen, goes so far even as to make the longing for extinction. his main theme and dominant Leitmotiv, giving expression to the most negative conception of the Nirvâna-idea, which Schopenhauer finds realised in the utter negation of the will.

Schopenhauer's conception of music is, that although it is related to the world as the representation to the thing represented, it is, nevertheless, not an imitation of nature in any of its various phenomena, but a copying of the will itself, who is the creator of nature and its metaphysical condition, the thing-in-itself. Thus he traces, if not a likeness, yet a parallelism between music and the manifestations of the real world. He says:

"I recognise in the deepest tones of harmony, in the bass, the lowest grades of the objectification of will, unorganised nature, the mass of the planet. Further, in the whole of the complemental parts which make up the harmony between the bass and the leading voice singing the melody, I recognise the gradation of the ideas in which the will objectifies itself. Those nearer to the bass are the lower of these grades... the higher represent to me the world of plants and beasts. . . lastly, in the melody, in the high-singing principal voice leading the whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the unbroken significant connexion of one thought

from beginning to end representing a whole, I recognise the highest grade of the objectification of the will, the intellectual life and effort of man."'

Schopenhauer repudiates the theory of a direct imitation of nature, and yet is his fault in theory the same as that of Abbé Vogler. However helpful the method of symbolising in music the various phenomena may be, and however suggestive the onomatopoetic aspirations may prove to composers, all these references of music to the surrounding world are foreign to its inmost nature. It is true that the very greatest composers were not free from attempts at imitating all kinds of natural events. Handel sought to express ir music the Egyptian darkness. Haydn reproduced the effect of light in his oratorium, Die Schöpfung, in the passage Es werde Licht und es ward Licht; Beethoven reproduced in his pastorale scenes of idyllic life, a storm and the return of a rainbow-graced sunshine. Loewe, best known through his melodious ballads, in his Auferweckung des Lazarus, went so far as to indicate in tones the odors rising from the tomb. Granted that these composers produced grand and original music in the passages that were suggested by such ideas, we cannot say that they accomplished their intentions. We have to be told that these trumpets mean light and those drums imitate thunder. They may mean anything else; and Rossini's grand composition of Stabat mater might illustrate as much the triumph of a struggling hero as the tears of a mourning mother.

Music is a world of its own. It practically demonstrates to us that the real world of nature is only one actualisation among many possibilities. We can imagine that other universes existed which differ in kind from this in which we live. It may be built up without matter and without anything that deserves the name substance. Yet in order to be a universe it must be an exemplification of law. Music is the most perfect embodiment of purely abstract law. Nothing is more abstract than number, and musical forms reveal to our immediate apprehension nothing but numerical relations. Nevertheless, music is no arithmetic, and sonatas are no paradigms. Music is all through aglow with sentiment, and it is well known to be the most effective means of rousing and laying the passions of our heart. And why is that? Because if we could analyse all the

throbs of our life, we would find nothing but motion.

Our pulse is

rhythm, our breathing is rhythmic, our walk and all our doings, our loves and hates, our hopes and fears, our pains and pleasures, in a word, all our emotions are rhythms that are scanned in the vibrating functions of the organs of our body.1 Our physical life, in all its details, is a sonata which we perform without being able to hear its music. We know nothing of the metre, we only feel it, or, better, our life-actions are the changeful metre itself, and we live on in its perpetuation and constant repetition.

As a musical sound agitates a chord whose note corresponds with it, and rouses its slumbering note, so the music of sentiment that lies concealed in the rhythm of our life responds to the songs and sonatas of the composer as it happens to find our organisation attuned to their reception, and the soul re-echoes the appeal of melodies according to the rhythms that are awakened in the delicate fibres of its most secret life.

EDITOR.

1 The all-importance of rhythm is very forcibly shown in Professor Billroth's posthumous essay, "Wer ist musikalisch?" published by Eduard Hanslick in the Deutsche Rundschau, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Berlin, 1894).

THE KEY TO THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE.

A DISQUISITION ON MR. EDWARD DOUGLAS

FAWCETT'S PHILOSOPHY.

ONADOLOGY is a philosophical system based upon a psycho

MONADOLOGY

logical hypothesis that is now almost universally regarded as antiquated. Its greatest representatives were Leibnitz and Herbart, but there are only a few disciples of Herbart now left in Germany, among whom O. Flügel and Ed. Dillmann1 are the most active and best known, while in England a new and able champion of monadology has arisen in the person of Mr. E. Douglas Fawcett.

That a theory is considered antiquated is no reason why it should not be revised and tried again, but the trouble with monadology is that it renders the facts for whose explanation it is invented, more mysterious and complicated than they naturally are. The problem is solved at the sacrifice of a number of new problems, the solution of which is a hopeless task, and the sole comfort lies in the consideration that having transcended the boundary line of physics, are moving in the fairy-tale realm of metaphysics, where physical experiment and proof is dispensed with and speculation can be indulged in without fear of the pruning-hook of criticism.

we

Mr. Fawcett is a scholar who is well read in the history of philosophy; his command of language is excellent, and some of the new terms which he has invented are very forcible. But the abler the defence the more obvious becomes the gratuitousness of the monad

lehre.

1See O. Flügel, Die Seelenfrage, and Ed. Dillmann, Darstellung der Monaden

ological assumptions. Indeed, the theory need only be worked out in detail to reveal the fallacies of its complicated metaphysical apparatus, and any student of the system, except perhaps its own inventor and some of his most ardent disciples, will lose confidence in the practicability of the scheme.

Among the arguments which are supposed to buttress the theory of monadology the strongest one is said to be found in the testimony furnished by our workaday consciousness. A subject is posited as

the ground, source, and sustainer of our fugitive states of consciousness. Mr. Fawcett argues :

'No subject, no flux of sensations in time; no subject, no order of sensations in space; no subject, no memory, no expectation; no subject, no introspection; no subject, no explicit I-reference."-Riddle of the Universe, p. 265.

The subject is described as a monad, i. e., "a unitary individual centre of consciousness, actual or potential." (P. 337.)

Monads are described as atomic, and the chemical atoms appear to be monads of a lower order. The subject is the central monad in man's organism; for there are also "ganglionic monads " and "a variety of states separately present in separate monads are mirrored as united in the glassy essence of the subject" (p. 314).

The monads, however, although called the well-springs of reality, have themselves sprung from a universal subject which is the impersonal prius of existence and the ground of all reality whatever. This prius is neither conscious nor unconscious, but metaconscious, whatever that may mean, and in it "individuals can hang side by side without mixing."

The sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and psychology, will have to be rethought from the standpoint of the metaphysics of monadology; such "well-attested phenomena," as clairvoyance, thought-transference, and telepathy, which bewilder a materialistic science, fit in easily with Mr. Fawcett's doctrine, and new light is promised on old problems, especially in the domain of evolution. Mr. Fawcett says:

"The universe is made up of individuals of various grades, its development is the expression of their development, and this, again, rests on their mutual further