As the painter sees visible objects with quite different eyes from those of the common person -- so too the poet experiences the events of the outer and the inner world very differently from the ordinary person. But nowhere is it more striking than in music -- that it is only the spirit that poeticizes the objects and the changes of the material, and that the beautiful, the subject of art, is not given to us nor can it be found ready in phenomena. All sounds produced by nature are rough -- and empty of spirit -- only the musical soul often finds the rustling of the forest -- the whistling of the wind, the song of the nightingale, the babbling of the brook melodious and meaningful. The musician takes the essence of his art from within himself -- not even the slightest suspicion of imitation can apply to him. To the painter, visible nature seems everywhere to be doing his preliminary work -- to be entirely his unattainable model. But really the painter's art has arisen just as independently, quite as a priori, as the musician's. Only the painter uses an infinitely more difficult symbolic language than the musician -- the painter really paints with his eye -- his art is the art of seeing with order and beauty. Here seeing is quite active - entirely a formative activity. His image is only his secret sign - his expression - his reproducing tool.
Suppose we compare the written musical note with this artificial sign. The musician might rather counter the painter's image with the diverse movements of the fingers, the feet and the mouth. Really the musician too hears actively -- he distinguishes by hearing. For most people this reversed use of the senses is certainly a mystery, but every artist will be more or less clearly aware of it. Almost every person is to a limited degree already an artist. In fact he sees actively and not passively - he feels actively and not passively.
The main difference is this: the artist has vivified the germ of self-formative life in his sense organs - he has raised the excitability of these for the spirit and is thereby able to allow ideas to flow out of them at will - without external prompting - to use them as tools for such modifications of the real world as he will.
On the other hand for the nonartist they speak only through the intervention of external prompting, and the spirit, like inert matter, seems to be governed by or to submit to the constraint of the basic laws of mechanics, namely that all changes presuppose an external cause and that effect an countereffect must equal each other at all times. At least it is some consolation to know that this mechanical behavior is unnatural to the spirit and is transient, like all that is spiritually unnatural.
Yet even with the most humble person the spirit does not wholly obey the law of mechanics -- and hence it would be possible for everyone to develop this higher propensity and skill of the organ.
Novalis, Logological Fragments II, 17
The term 'logological' is a coinage by Novalis. In Greek, the term logos means both (a) word and (b) principle (as in all the English words which end in -logy, meaning principles of whatever it happens to be). In this neologism, Novalis is trading on both these meanings. Logology is a discourse about principles, or perhaps first principles. Certainly, the content sets out Novalis's convictions about the root or basic ideas underlying Romanticism as he understood it, the philosophy of Romanticism as we might now say. (Lavin & Donnachie)
Blake, Hecate or the Three Fates
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