Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



not in the same plane with them at all, nor an 

 actuality in the same sense. 



According to this view the notion that one 

 configuration of atoms or bodies determines the 

 next configuration turns out to be illusive. Both 

 configurations are determined by a third something 

 which does not belong to quite the same order of 

 existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance 

 ** laws " of succession may doubtless be found 

 among physical events, and are valuable for prac- 

 tical purposes, but at any moment — owing to their 

 superficiality — they may fail. Thus, an insect 

 observing the expansion of the petals of a chry- 

 santhemum might frame a law of their order 

 of succession in size and colour, which would be 

 valid for a time, but would fail entirely when the 

 stamens appeared. Or, to take another illus- 

 tration, physical science acts like a man trying 

 to find direct causal relations between the various 

 leaves of a tree, without first finding the relations 

 of these to the branches and trunk — and so solving 

 the problem indirectly. It deals only with the 

 surface of the world of Man. 



In thinking about such matters, Music, as 

 Schopenhauer shows, is wonderfully illustrative, 

 because in creating music man recognises that 

 he is creating a world of his own — apart from 

 and not to be confused with that other world of 

 Nature (in which he does not recognise any of 

 his handiwork). Supposing a non-musical person 

 were to examine and analyse the score of a Beet- 

 hoven symphony, he would be in the same posi- 



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