'Soul.' Music, addressing itself through the ear to the emotions, is the
art of the longing, divining, loving soul. It never excites abstract or
antagonistic thought; it unites humanity in concrete feeling. It
certainly cannot be denied that sounds address themselves immediately to
the feelings; that the tones of the voice are highly sympathetic; that
the sighs, groans, shrieks, cries of a sufferer affect us far more
vividly than the mere sight of the same degree of suffering.
But though the arts seem to us to be thus divided, each art is also
threefold, and must appeal to the triune nature of man. As man only
truly lives, so he only truly creates, as a threefold being, yet his
_life_ is ever one, so that soul, spirit, and body are constantly acting
and reacting upon each other. When the divine wisdom shines into the
spirit, it gives it the perception of intellectual truths, which truths
throw their light far into the dimmer soul; and when the divine love
pours into the soul, it gifts it with the almost limitless faculty of
loving, which warms and quickens the colder spirit, until it germs and
buds in the lovely bloom of human charities and self-abnegating good
deeds.
It is not our intention here to enter into any detailed speculations
upon the hidden mysteries of our being; we simply call the attention of
the reader to the fact that there is a class of truths which must belong
to the universal reason (such as mathematical axioms, syllogistic
formulae, logical deductions, etc.
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