104/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

According to Schopenhauef, whose treatise on Music was the first satisfactory exposition of that art, from a philosophical standpoint, “The (Platonic) Ideas are the adequate objectivation of the Will. It is the end of all the arts, except music, to facilitate the cognition of the Ideas by means of the representation of single things. . . .

Music, as it ignores the Ideas, does not in the least depend on the perceptible [i.e., natural] world; it ignores it unconditionally; and it could still exist, in a certain measure, even if the world were not here at all; which cannot be said of the other arts. For music is as immediate an objectivation and image of the universal Will as the world itself is,

even as the Ideas also are, the diversified appearance of which constitutes the world. Thus music is by no means an image of the Ideas, as the other arts are, but an image of the Will itself,…. and therefore the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of other arts; for these speak of shadows only, whilst it speaks of essentials.

As, however, the same identical Will shows itself in the Ideas as well as in music, only in each of the two in a totally different way, there must consequently be a parallelism, an analogy, though by no means an immediate likeness, between music and between the Ideas, whose appearances in diversity and in completeness constitute the visible world.”

Again, he says, music “never expresses phenomena, but solely the inner being, the essence of phenomena, the Will itself, . . . the inner soul of things without their body…. It represents, accordingly, the metaphysics of all that is physical in the world, the thing per se, which lies behind all appearances…. It gives the inmost kernel of things that precedes all formation, the very heart of things.”