An introduction to a biology : and other papers / by A.D. Darbishire.
- Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire
- Date:
- 1917
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: An introduction to a biology : and other papers / by A.D. Darbishire. Source: Wellcome Collection.
41/322 page 17
![An Introduction to a Biology to now and again, then in the course of time his hearers would get to know it, or rather to recognise parts of it when they heard it again ; and that in this way a man's compositions would gradually come to be recognised as music. [According to this view it will be seen that music was pure invention. The second stage in the history of my conception of natural law was analogous to the second stage in the history of my conception of music. In it I believed that natural laws were pure inventions of the human mind, and projected by the mind, or rather allowed to escape from the mind, into things. My third and present stage with regard to music is, to a great extent, a return to the first stage. Music can convey to us part of the order of nature, that part which is alive. The great musicians are the springs through which this message wells up, for us. My third and present stage with regard to natural law also returns to the first stage, but it returns a very much shorter distance. I believe that the present system of scientific laws relating to life is very much further from portraying the essence of life, than is, for instance, the eighth symphony of Beethoven. But a theory of life cannot be communicated at present by music, and one must make an attempt to communi¬ cate it through the inadequate medium of words. The point to which we have now reached in this attempt is that from which we see natural law to be, to a very great extent, a product of the human in¬ tellect. ]i ^ This passage is half deleted in the MS., and was clearly intended to be re-written.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18032084_0042.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
