Resonance

“ From this we may understand how resonances may be caused and harmonies may be heard in nature, the real origin of which may not be perceived by the common observer, or even by the learned investigator. ”

“ The different types of voice are characterized no less by their timbre than by their range. Voices present so many varieties, they are so personal, that thorough classification is almost impossible. Endless shades of difference are produced by the degree of intensity of the harmonics: if the intensity is great, the voice is brilliant, mordant; if feeble, the voice is soft, sombre. In the larynx itself, and in the trachea, there occurs a resonance, the effects of which have not yet been determined. ”

“ Sense-bearing motion along the vitals springs.
For lurks this essence far and deep and under,
Nor in our body is aught more shut from view,
And 'tis the very soul of all the soul.
And as within our members and whole frame
The energy of mind and power of soul
Is mixed and latent, since create it is
Of bodies small and few, so lurks this fourth,
This essence void of name, composed of small,
And seems the very soul of all the soul,
And holds dominion o'er the body all. ”

“ All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. ”

“ So I shall ask you to imagine a tone at a high rate of vibration, to see it striking the hearer’s brain at a certain focus, creating there a centre of energy, which tending to crystallization, fixes the thought in the mind. And the more366 permanent duration of pleasant (which are high) thoughts and tones is evident if we glance back over a long period of time and note how the joys stand out and the griefs disappear; so we always forget physical suffering. ”

“ Their gross unconsciousness survive Thy godlike energy of thought? In thoughts which answer to my own, In words which reach my inward ear, Like whispers from the void Unknown, I feel thy living presence here. ”

“ We give ourselves up to a soft sensation of repose, and whilst our senses, touched by the harmony of the colors, the forms, and the sounds, experience the agreeable in the highest, the mind is rejoiced by the easy and rich flow of the ideas, the heart by the sentiments which overflow in it like a torrent. All at once a storm springs up, darkening the sky and all the landscape, surpassing and silencing all other noises, and suddenly taking from us all our pleasures. ”

“ All those imperceptible regrets, which never individually reach the consciousness, accumulate at last into a definite result; they become the voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration; their tone is melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these Aeolian vibrations of the heart is all hope—a proof that these thousands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. ”

“ I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards making of element, colour, form or sound a mirror, on which, outside itself, it would find symbols of all that was pent within itself, and so gradually becoming self-conscious in the material nature in which it was embodied, but which was still effigy or shadow of a divine original. ”

“ Beyond doubt the world is full of sounds that we cannot hear and of sights that we never see, for of the whole range of vibration our senses permit us to garner but the veriest fragment—a few notes here of sound, and a brief range there of sight, out of the whole vast scale of vibrant Nature. ”

“ The mind sees beauties which the physical eye never beholds. The mental ear hears harmonies, melodies which the auditory nerve is too gross to perceive. The soul through its closer union with God receives perceptions which even the mind cannot comprehend. ”

“ That continual change, to be discovered by the attentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, was but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion—the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all mind and matter, in turn, what life they had. ”

“ And, connected with this inquiry, is the remark, that even in the usual outward senses there lies a spark of higher spiritual perception—such, for instance, as the artistic eye for beauty of form and color, and for grace of motion, or the musical ear for lovely sounds and measures; so that even the senses are not so purely corporeal, so totally material and grossly sensuous, as at the first glance they appear. ”

“ But those human energies which are informed with mind, realize themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corresponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. ”

“ As the touch of the air is felt in the sense of touch, and the whisper of it heard in the ear, so also the contact of the perfections of the Beloved is felt and enjoyed in the touch of the soul — that is, in the substance thereof, through the instrumentality of the will; and the knowledge of the attributes of God felt in the hearing of the soul — that is, in the understanding. ”

“ A consciousness related to the whole of the world’s events, and to the whole of time, precisely as our human consciousness is related to a single melody or rhythm, and to the brief but still extended interval of time which this melody or rhythm occupies, — such a consciousness, I say, is an Eternal Consciousness. In principle we already possess and are acquainted with the nature of such a consciousness, whenever we do experience any succession as one whole. ”

“ As in lofty experiences of appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. ”

“ He widens it, too, to include deeper and subtler tones than those of our earth-born sense—the heavenly sports and melodies and harmonies which the rightly attuned spirit may hear with a finer organ than the ear. ”

“ Every sensation—as for example, color—is therefore only the subjective form in which an excitation of our peculiar Being, sustained through the instrumentality of external influence, comes to consciousness in us,
(2) Although no single sensation is a copy of the reality, yet definite relations with one another of the single real ‘Things’ seem to come to our perception in the very forms of combination in which different sensations are brought to us in juxtaposition or succession ”

“ They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. ”

“ Thus, and this is the conclusion at which we aim, it is in the soul, regarded as the focus of all those rays refracted through the senses, as the central light outshining all others, that we must set the power and the right to discern what the senses do not discern, and to pierce to a depth forever beyond their reach. ”

“ And if we carry our observation outwards, we also find that light and darkness, sound and silence, motion and quiescence, equality and inequality, preceding and following, succession and simultaneousness, any positive phenomenon whatever and its negative, are distinct phenomena, pointedly contrasted, and the one always absent where the other is present. ”

“ Whether it came and went, grew and shrank, following delicately the moods or reflections of the spirit within, or whether it was a purely fortuitous effect of light and refraction, no man was ever able to say. ”

“ Such an inchoate ideality of matter, [178] which appears no longer as under the form of space, but as temporal ideality, [179] is sound, the sensuous set down as negated, with its abstract visibility converted into audibility, inasmuch as sound, so to speak, liberates the ideal content from its immersion in matter. ”

“ Sensation by a Medium.—Objects, as we have just seen, are necessarily apprehended as without us; and in general, as removed from us by a great or small distance. Yet they affect our bodily senses; and this leads us irresistibly to the conviction that they are perceived by means of something intermediate. Vision, or hearing, or smell, or the warmth of a fire, must be communicated to us by some Medium of Sensation. ”

“ We can think of ourselves as having the feelings of this class, and having no other. In that case, our whole being would be a series of Hearings. It would be one sensation of hearing, another sensation of hearing, and nothing more. Our thread of consciousness would be the sensation, which we denominate sound. Life and sound would be two names for the same thing. ”

“ Within our being are sympathetic chords that can vibrate to all the symphonies of Nature. There are visions of beauty and depths of feeling which may be seen and felt, if heart and mind are open to the higher influences. ”

“ From resistance, or the sensation produced when something 'resists our attempts to grasp it,' we get the 'outness.' Then perception is 'nothing more than the association of this complex notion with our other sensations—the notion of something extended and resisting, suggested by these sensations, when the suggestions themselves have previously arisen, and suggested in the same manner and on the same principle as any other associate feeling suggests any other associate feeling.' [486] The odour or colour of a rose recalls the sensation of touching and of resistance to our grasp. ”

“ Let us have no transcendentalism; everything that is must be explained by sound, or by touch, or by smell, or by the taste. All this talk of a great central sun with light, making landscapes and from which all things come, we have no way of proving ”

“ In regard to the beauty and sublimity of forms and color, it is equally true, as in reference to sound, that the alteration of circumstances will very materially alter the nature of the emotions connected with them. If they are so combined as to cause incongruous emotions, or if they do not harmonize with the general design of any composition, emotions of the sublime or beautiful are not awakened. ”

“ Like the large pulsation, made up of innumerable small pulses fused in one, so is every great and clear act of the mind, or intuition of the soul, made up of the results of countless efforts, countless experiences of the past. An irresistible conjecture is often unremembered knowledge. ”

“ The medium, that is, made diaphanous and motive by colour or sound, acts, by a succession of undulations, upon the eye or the ear, and finally, through the humours of the former and the air in the latter, upon the sentient part of these organs; so that there is an evident analogy between these undulations and the impulses which maintain locomotion until lost in the state of rest. ”

“ This then must conclude our discussion of the several organs of sense-perception.
Part 6 One might ask: if every body is infinitely divisible, are its sensible qualities- Colour, Savour, Odour, Sound, Weight, Cold or Heat, [Heaviness or] Lightness, Hardness or Softness-also infinitely divisible? ”

“ His dark and beautiful eye gleamed with tenfold lustre; his every nerve, his every pulse, confessed the awakened consciousness, that she, on whom his soul had doted, ever since he acknowledged the existence of his intellectuality, was present before him. ”

“ Using then, as our instrument of research, that totality of attributes by which the soul in its rare moments of rhythmic consummation visualizes the world, the question arises—what, in plain untechnical terms, is the revelation made to us by this complex medium? Here, as before, I am anxious, before I venture upon such a hazardous undertaking as an answer to this question, to indicate clearly that what I am attempting to state is a revelation which is common to the experience of all souls, wherever such a thing as the soul exists. ”

“ With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we have seen in View Two, all Shadows and Reflections disappear, and, in place of "seeing as through a glass darkly," the Soul has its true birth, and at last enters upon its heritage in the Divine Life, face to face with the Reality, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. ”

“ We are thus compelled to admit that we have here to do with a synthesis which is, so to speak, qualitative, a gradual organization of our successive sensations, a unity resembling that of a phrase in a melody. ”

“ The leading principle of the Inquiry is, that something extended, solid, and movable is directly manifested in our sensuous experiences, equally with the direct manifestations of our own sensations and other feelings when we are conscious of them; and also that we are obliged by common sense to regard extended, solid, and movable things as other than mere transitory sensation or idea. Extended things, large or small, refuse to be melted down into sensations or states of one’s private consciousness. ”

“ In studying the chemical or sound ether we were faced with the fact that part of the etheric realm, although in itself accessible to the spiritual part of the sense of sight, offers supersensible experience comparable to the perception of sound. ”

“ Among which of its parts shall we look for the grandeur of movement, the rush of harmonies, and the eloquence, more powerful than that of words, which, as it thrills the metallic strings, awakens responsive vibrations among those differently constituted and conditioned strings which form the organ of hearing, and through this organ arouses emotions among the deepest of which our natures are susceptible? ”