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then listen I
To the celestial Sirens’ harmony
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres
And sing to those that hold the vital shears
And turn the adamantine spindle round
Of which the fate of gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune.

From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser one, whom we shall have occasion to quote again by and by: to the Orchestra of Sir John Davies (1596), who sees this whole Universe treading the harmonious measures of a dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

For lo, the sea that fleets about the land,
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and Measure both doth understand;
For his great Crystal Eye is always cast
Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast;
And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere,
So daunceth he about the centre here.

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world solemnly in a footnote, “Modern astronomy has exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres….” (The Professor wrote “singular” when he meant “curious.”–The notion was never “singular.”) “These ‘spheres,'” he adds, “have disappeared, and their music with them, except in poetry.” Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained harmony: and what Plato called “Necessity” is the duty in all things of obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his noble Ode,

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the microcosm. All “transcendental” philosophy,–all discussions of the “Absolute,” of mind and matter, of “subjective” and “objective” knowledge, of “ideas” and “phenomena,” “flux” and “permanence”–all “systems” and “schools,” down from the earliest to be found in “Ritter and Preller,” through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet again on to James and Bergson–all inevitably work out to this, that the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some corresponding harmony within himself. Lacking him, the harmony (so far as he knows) would utterly lack the compliment of an audience: by his own faulty instrument he must seek to interpret it, if it is to be interpreted at all: and so, like the man at the piano, he goes on “doing his best.”

* * * * *

“God created Man in His image,” says the Scripture: “and,” adds Heine, “Man made haste to return the compliment.” It sounds wicked, but is one of the truest things ever said. After all, and without vanity, it is the best compliment Man can pay, poor fellow!–and he goes on striving to pay it, though often enough rebuked for his zeal. “Canst thou,” demands the divine Interlocutor in the Book of Job—

“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?”