Imatges de pàgina
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tardily, giving way to the Copernican heliocentric system. Shakespeare, writing as much as half a century after the death of Copernicus, still speaks of—

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while Milton in Paradise Lost seems, for whatever reason, still to be vacillating between the rival systems, though by that time Copernicus had been dead 124 years.

It was to meet the demands of astronomical observation that it became necessary to postulate a ninth and even a tenth sphere in addition to the original eight. This outermost sphere was the crystalline' sphere, or primum mobile, Milton's First Moved' and Sir Thomas Browne's' First Movable.'

Now it was the teaching of Pythagoras that the celestial spheres emitted musical tones as a necessary effect of their rapid and uniform motion. It is these tones which are the music of the spheres. This is the music which Dante heard in Paradise, and which to Milton was a 'ninefold harmony.'

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Plato, writing in the fourth century B.C. and accepting, as any well-informed Greek would, the current theory of the movements of the heavenly bodies and of the music so produced, embellishes it with poetic ornament. Thus, according to him, the tone produced by each sphere as it revolved was due to the voice of a presiding siren. Upon each of the circles,' he says (Rep., x., 617), stands a siren who travels round with the circle, uttering one note in one tone.' We may see the Platonic cosmogony set forth in detail in the Timaus (38), where the origin of the spheres and of the planets is described, though their serial order differs from that given by other writers (e.g., Cicero, to whose version of the Greek account of the universe I shall have occasion to refer later on), especially in regard to the place in that order of the sun. It is unnecessary here to discuss such differences, or the disputed question whether the planets had motions of their own independent of those of the spheres which carried them. Plato, of course, is putting forward no novelty of scientific speculation in speaking of the spheres and their motions; he is for the most part only repeating what was already accepted as truth, if not as mere commonplace.

After Plato Aristotle; but it will be convenient to reserve for the moment further consideration of his account of the Pythagorean teaching. In the meantime we pass on to some later expositions of such teaching.

The elder Pliny (A.D. 23-79), who sacrificed his life to his scien

Thus in the Timeus the sun is fixed in the second sphere above the earth'; in the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero it is placed in the fourth.

tific curiosity in the great eruption of Vesuvius which overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii, expounds the Pythagorean theory (Nat. Hist., ii., 22). There are distances between the planets, and there are intervals in the musical scale; and there is an analogy, or rather a correspondence, between the two sets of facts. Pythagoras, he says, applying musical relations accordingly, calls the distance separating the moon from the earth a tone; that separating Mercury from the moon half that space— that is, a semitone; that from Mercury to Venus about as much; thence to the sun a tone and a half; that from the sun to Mars a tone, as far as from the earth to the moon; thence to Jupiter a semitone; that from Jupiter to Saturn a semitone; and, finally, thence to the sphere which carries the fixed stars a tone and a half. In this way seven tones are completed; and this, he says, the Pythagoreans call diapason harmony, as being a sequence of musical sounds in definite orderly relation to one. another extending through all' the notes.

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Censorinus (De Die Natali, xiii., A.D. 238) also gives an account of the Pythagorean system. He states, in agreement with Pliny, that Pythagoras taught that the whole universe was created on a musical principle, so that the seven planets are at distances in correspondence with musical intervals. The planetary spheres, as they are at different altitudes above the earth, produce by their revolutions sounds which similarly differ in pitch, sounds so concordant, he says, that they create the sweetest melody. This melody, however, is inaudible to us, owing to the magnitude or massiveness of the sound, and the narrowness of the human ear-passage, which is thus unable to receive it. He quotes Pliny almost word for word; but he differs from him in one important particular. The diapason harmony of Censorinus is constituted by six tones, and not, as Pliny's, by seven. He agrees with Pliny that the Pythagorean interval between the earth and the sun corresponds to three and a half tones, that is, a perfect fifth ; but he differs from him as to the interval between the sun and the heaven of the fixed stars. According to Pliny this interval corresponds to another perfectly similar three and a half tonesa second perfect fifth; according to Censorinus the interval is only two and a half tones—a perfect fourth.

Macrobius (circa A.D. 400) gives a very clear and definite account of the music of the spheres. This he does in his commentary on the dream of Scipio contained in the sixth book of Cicero's De Republica (16 ff.). Cicero introduces Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, as holding converse with the spirit of his dead father in a dream or vision. Under his father's guidance

The Greek harmony' is, of course, entirely different in meaning from that which we understand by that term.

Scipio beholds the vast mechanism of the revolving spheres, and from him he seeks an explanation of the wonderful sights and sounds that break upon him. The scene reminds us of the similar meeting between Æneas and his father, Anchises, which is related in the sixth book of the Æneid, and which, indeed, may have been suggested to Virgil by it. Scipio describes the spheres in their order. There are nine of them, the ninth, limiting and containing the rest, being the supreme God Himself.

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While [he says] I was gazing in amazement at the sight, I said as soon as I had recovered myself: What is this sound, so powerful and yet so sweet, which fills my ears?'

His father replies that the sound is due to the action of the spheres themselves, for it is impossible for motions on so vast a scale to go on in silence. Yet men, he objects, do not hear it; how is that? Men's ears, it is replied, through being glutted with the sound have grown deaf: 'It is the dullest of your senses,' just as the people who live at the cataracts of the Nile are devoid of the sense of hearing, owing to the vastness of the noise. Here you have a sound caused by the extremely rapid revolution of the whole universe; is it then to be wondered at that your ears cannot take in this celestial sound? Macrobius in his commentary goes on to explain that a series of sounds is produced as the whole of the spheres revolve, the outermost revolving sphere, the eighth, that of the fixed stars, since its revolution is the most rapid, producing the highest note, and the first, that of the moon, being the least rapid, the lowest. The seven planetary spheres, from Saturn to the moon, move from west to east, in the opposite direction, as Plato had already taught, to that of the eighth. Moreover, though all eight revolve, yet, Macrobius says, there are only seven notes, Mercury and Venus producing the same tone since their orbits are equal in time.

Here at least then we have a simple and straightforward account of the music of the spheres; they revolve round the earth as centre; necessarily they revolve at different velocities, since they are at different distances from the centre, and accomplish their revolutions in the same time. Each sphere in its revolution produced its own note, whose pitch was determined by the velocity of the sphere's motion, so that a complete scale -a' diapason harmony '-was created by all the spheres.

Among other writers who have discussed the Pythagorean teaching I might cite Boethius (A.D. 480-524, De Musica, i., 27) as well as Cassiodorus (A.D. 490-585, De Art. Lib., v.); but enough, I think, has been already said to make the main features of the theory clear. I think, however, that some further treatment of the question of the audibility of the music of

the spheres is desirable. If the spheres in their revolutions produced musical tones, and musical tones of such great intensity, why were they not heard? We have seen the answers given by Cicero and Censorinus to this question. The human ear is incapable of perceiving them, either because it has been stunned into this special deafness or because of its physical and original incapacity to respond to so powerful a stimulus. And we have had Sir Thomas Browne explaining in his mystical way that this music is of a purely intellectual nature; it makes and can make no impression on the sense of hearing. In maintaining this view, Sir Thomas Browne, who knew his Aristotle, was, as I shall now proceed to show, but reproducing in his own way the conclusions of that philosopher.

Aristotle starts by

Finally, then, we turn to Aristotle. admitting (De Calo, ii., 8, trans. Grote) that the circles are moved, and the stars, being themselves at rest, are fastened in the circles, and carried round with them.' Then he asks the question in set terms (ii., 9), 'If the vast bodies of the stars were carried round . . . as all men say they are, they must necessarily make a prodigious sound which would reach here to us, and would wear us out. . . . Why do we not hear this immense sound?' He replies by giving first the answer of the Pythagoreans: that 'we have been hearing it constantly from the moment of our birth'; that we have no experience of an opposite state, or state of silence, with which to contrast it'; that 'men cease to be affected by it, just as blacksmiths from constant habit cease to be affected by the noise of their own work.' (We see here the source whence Cicero drew his reference to the Nile cataract.) The explanation, however 'graceful and poetic,' is necessarily rejected by Aristotle as inadmissible:

They ought to explain [he continues] upon their hypothesis, not merely why we hear nothing, but why we have no uncomfortable impression apart from hearing.. . . The impression produced here by the sound of the celestial bodies must be violent beyond all endurance.

Having thus demolished the Pythagoreans, he goes on to give his own answer to the question:

There is good reason [he says] why we neither hear nor suffer anything from them, viz. that they make no sound.

Thus even as early as the fourth century B.C. the music of the spheres would have received its quietus had not the imagination of the poet, then as always, triumphed over the reason of the philosopher.

W. J. FOXELL.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake to return unaccepted MSS.

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