easures of
a dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

_For lo, the sea that fleets about the land,
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and Measure both doth understand;
For his great Crystal Eye is always cast
Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast;
And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere,
So daunceth he about the centre here._

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world
solemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singular
notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres...." (The Professor wrote
"singular" when he meant "curious."--The notion was never "singular.")
"These 'spheres,'" he adds, "have disappeared, and their music with
them, except in poetry." Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and
one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not
a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it
at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained
harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of
obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his
noble Ode,

_Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong._

Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this
macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at
all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the
microcosm. All "transcendental" philosophy,--all discussions of the
"Absolute," of mind and matter, of "subjective" and "objective"
knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena," "flux" and "permanence"--all
"systems" and "schools," down from the earliest to be found in "Ritter
and Preller," through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas,
to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and
Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet
again on to James and Bergson--all inevitably work out to this, that the
Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he
apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some
corresponding harmony within himself. Lacking him, the harmony (so far
as he knows) would utterly lack the compliment of an audience: by his
own faulty instrument he must seek to interpret it, if it is to be
interpreted at all: and so, like the man at the piano, he goes on "doing
his be