The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon.

We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will ; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.

It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime. or both as an opera. Such particular pictures of human life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it or correspond to it with stringent necessity ; but they stand to it only in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept.

In the determinateness of the real, they represent that which music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are to a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual. This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the object of perception, the special and individual, the particular case, both to the universality of the concepts and to the universality of the melodies.

But these two viniversalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other ; for the concepts contain particulars only as the first forms abstracted from perception, as it were, the separated shell of things ; thus they are, strictly speaking, dbstracta ; music, on the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things.

This relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen by saying the concepts are the universcdia post rent, but music gives the universalia ante rem, and the real world the universalia in re. To the universal significance of a melody to which a poem has been set, it is quite possible to set other equally arbitrarily selected examples of the universal expressed in this poem corresponding to the significance of the melody in the

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same degree. This is why the same composition is suitable to many verses ; and this is also what makes the vaudeirUle possible. But that in general a relation is possible between a composition and a perceptible representation rests, as we have said, upon the fact that both are simply different expressions of the same inner being of the world. When now, in the particular case, such a relation is actually given, that is to say, when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy discovered by the composer between ihe two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions, otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon. All specially imitative music does this ; for example, “The Seasons,” by Haydn; also many passages of his “ Creation,” in which phenomena ^f Jbhje external world ar^ clir^Iy imitated ; also all battle-^i^s. S^ucb music is"entu'e1y to be reeled.

The unutterable depth of all music by virtue of which it floats through our consciousness as the vision of a paradise firmly believed in yet ever distant from us, and by which also it is so fully understood and yet so inexplicable, rests on the fact that it restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain. So also the seriousness which is essential to it, which excludes the absurd from its direct and peculiar province, is to be explained by the fact that its object is not the idea, with reference to which alone deception and absurdity are possible ; but its object is directly the will, and this is essentially the most serious of all things, for it is that on which all depends. How rich in content and full of

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FHE WORLD IDEA.

BK. III.

significance the language of music is, we see from the repetitions, as well as the Da capo, the like of which would be unbearable in works composed in a language of words, but in music are very appropriate and beneficial, for, in order to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice.