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Now words are symbols which diminish in their efficacy as they try to compass feeling and imagination. If the wise man is cold, he can say, “I am cold”; but if he wishes to tell you of his idea of God, he has no words adequate for the purpose, because he is dealing with something which is not in the domain of knowledge alone—which he can feel, or perhaps imagine, but cannot define. The reason alone never even touches the far-away circle of that perfection which we believe to exist, and the subtle inner relations between man and the visible and invisible world refuse to be harnessed to language. For these he finds expression in some form of beauty. “The beautiful,” says Goethe, “is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.”

So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling, and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium of expression than language. And when that plastic medium, though non-definitive, has those qualities of coherence, continuity, and form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are justified in calling it “intellectual.” Let us take for our specific illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only, untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion arrived at by any person who understands it is that the feeling is absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that gives it its extraordinary effect. Compare it with the first movement of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathétique Symphony” where emotion runs riot; the difference is as great as that between “Victory” and “The Deemster.” Compare it with a symphony by Mendelssohn, and the contrast is as vivid as that between a novel by Meredith and one by Miss Braddon. Beethoven’s music contains, in the first place, themes whose import all completely receptive persons feel to be profound. (That these themes do not so impress others is due either to atrophy of the musical faculty, to mental lassitude, or to lack of experience of great music.) These themes are presented in such design as not only to make the whole movement entirely coherent, but to give it a sense of rushing onward to an inevitable conclusion. So intensive is their treatment that almost the whole five hundred or more measures grow out of the original theme or thesis, some fifteen measures long. So imaginative is it that it seems to gather to itself all related things in heaven and earth and fuse them into one. In short, we must say that this music emanates from the mind of a great man, who has subjected emotion to the control of the will and who has exercised that highest function of the mind that we call imagination.