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Updated: May 9, 2025
And, more remarkable still, as we shall have occasion to observe later, the very art which modern men regard as the most devoid of all intellectual content, the most incommensurable with any standard except that of pure beauty I refer of course to the art of music was invested by the Greeks with a definite moral content and worked into their general theory of art as a direct interpretation of human life.
Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.
But for us, who knows, alas! it is on the contrary the field of the great fear, which, out of pity, it would have been better if we had never been able to see; the incommensurable black void, where the worlds in their frenzied whirling precipitate themselves like rain, crash into and annihilate one another, only to be renewed for fresh eternities.
Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite incommensurable ideas.
Signs of the final disaster to follow were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were crossed by currents of carbonic acid; "the domestic animals were also very sensible of the approaching of the scourge; they lost the habitual vivacity, and having the food in disgust, had from time to time to complain with mournful wailings, without justified reasons.... The sky became of a thick darkness,... interrupted only by flashes of light which the lava reverberated, by the bloody gliding of the thunderbolts, by the incandescence of enormous projectiles, thrown to an incommensurable highness.... Death surprised the charming town; houses and streets became the tombs of the unhappies hit by an atrocious torture."
"Why not go to my uncle?" "Puir sugar-and-spice-selling bailie body! is there aught in his ledger about poetry, and the incommensurable value o' the products o' genius? Gang till the young scholar; he's a canny one, too, and he'll ken it to be worth his while to fash himsel a wee anent it."
The theory on which the latter charge rests seems to be that you can take an interest in yourself at any distance, but not in others if they are outside the circle of your own personality. This doctrine, when boldly expressed, seems to rest upon the very apotheosis of selfishness. Theologians have sometimes said, in perfect consistency, that it would be better for the whole race of man to perish in torture than that a single sin should be committed. One would rather have thought that a man had better be damned a thousand times over than allow of such a catastrophe; but, however this may be, the doctrine now suggested appears to be equally revolting, unless diluted so far as to be meaningless. It amounts to asserting that our love of our own infinitesimal individuality is so powerful that any matter in which we are personally concerned has a weight altogether incommensurable with that of any matter in which we have no concern. People who hold such a doctrine would be bound in consistency to say that they would not cut off their little finger to save a million of men from torture after their own death. Every man must judge of his own state of mind; though there is nothing on which people are more liable to make mistakes; and I am charitable enough to hope that the actions of such men would be in practice as different as possible from what they anticipate in theory. But it is enough to say that experience, if it proves any thing, proves this to be an inaccurate view of human nature. All the threats of theologians with infinite stores of time and torture to draw upon, failed to wean men from sins which gave them a passing gratification, even when faith was incomparably stronger than it is now, or is likely to be again. One reason, doubtless, is that the conscience is as much blunted by the doctrines of repentance and absolution as it is stimulated by the threats of hell-fire. But is it not contrary to all common-sense to expect that the motive will retain any vital strength when the very people who rely upon it admit that it rests on the most shadowy of grounds? The other motive, which is supposed to be so incomparably weaker that it cannot be used as a substitute, has yet proved its strength in every age of the world. As our knowledge of nature and the growth of our social development impress upon us more strongly every day that we live the close connection in which we all stand to each other, the intimate "solidarity" of all human interests, it is not likely to grow weaker; a young man will break a blood-vessel for the honor of a boat-club; a savage will allow himself to be tortured to death for the credit of his tribe; why should it be called visionary to believe that a civilized human being will make personal sacrifices for the benefit of men whom he has perhaps not seen, but whose intimate dependence upon himself he realizes at every moment of his life? May not such a motive generate a predominant passion with men framed to act upon it by a truly generous system of education? And is it not an insult to our best feelings and a most audacious feat of logic, to declare on
The prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of soul.
That vague, elusive, incommensurable something in the "Leaves" that led Symonds to say that talking about Whitman was like talking about the universe, that seems to challenge our pursuit and definition, that takes on so many different aspects to so many different minds, it seems to be this that has led Mr.
So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them.
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