Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
While between the old monotonous dance-chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its endless orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the contrast in heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the ancestor of the other. Were they needed, many further illustrations might be cited.
Parallelism is the materialist doctrine of those forewarned folk, who have perceived the errors committed and endeavour to avoid them, while cherishing all that can be saved of the condemned doctrine. That which philosophers criticised in materialism was the misunderstanding of the principle of heterogeneity.
Thus, without taking into account the infinitude of modifications which these changes of climate would produce upon the flora and fauna, both of land and sea, the reader will see the immense heterogeneity of the results wrought out by one force, when that force expends itself upon a previously complicated area; and he will readily draw the corollary that from the beginning the complication has advanced at an increasing rate.
The early lyre of the Greeks had four, constituting their tetrachord. In course of some centuries lyres of seven and eight strings were employed. And, by the expiration of a thousand years, they had advanced to their "great system" of the double octave. Through all which changes there of course arose a greater heterogeneity of melody.
Nevertheless, in virtue of the extended range of notes in use, the variety of modes, the occasional variations of time consequent on changes of metre, and the multiplication of instruments, music had, towards the close of Greek civilization, attained to considerable heterogeneity not indeed as compared with our music, but as compared with that which preceded it.
Simultaneously there came into use the different modes Dorian, Ionian, Phrygian, Æolian, and Lydian answering to our keys; and of these there were ultimately fifteen. As yet, however, there was but little heterogeneity in the time of their music.
On the side of the weapon-maker practice gives increased skill increased superiority to his products. On the side of his clients, cessation of practice entails decreased skill. Thus the influences which determine this division of labour grow stronger in both ways; and the incipient heterogeneity is, on the average of cases, likely to become permanent for that generation if no longer.
Investigations show that the Earth has been continually becoming more heterogeneous in virtue of the multiplication of sedimentary strata which form its crust; also, that it has been becoming more heterogeneous in respect of the composition of these strata, the later of which, being made from the detritus of the earlier, are many of them rendered highly complex by the mixture of materials they contain; and further, that this heterogeneity has been vastly increased by the actions of the Earth's still molten nucleus upon its envelope, whence have resulted not only many kinds of igneous rocks, but the tilting up of sedimentary strata at all angles, the formation of faults and metallic veins, the production of endless dislocations and irregularities.
Such symbols are sufficient, at least for a first approximation, when it is only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly considered, contains nothing "durable." But in biology and psychology quite different characteristics become essential; age and memory, heterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible rhythm "which cannot be lengthened or shortened at will."
Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous point called the present is the geometrical index. Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is pure heterogeneity.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking