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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: when the art or science has been far more developed, and has found the
secret of harmony, as well as of melody; secondly, the indefinite and
almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the
body.
In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may also
observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the present
day. With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only, there
seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean reverence for numbers and
numerical proportion to which Aristotle is a stranger. Intervals of sound
and number are to him sacred things which have a law of their own, not
dependent on the variations of sense. They rise above sense, and become a
The Republic |
