THE OCTAVE (SEPTENARY)IN NATURE AND IN MAN AS THE KEY TO PSYCHOLOGY


THE OCTAVE (SEPTENARY)IN NATURE AND IN MAN AS THE KEY TO PSYCHOLOGY. EVERY school-boy is aware that there is a mysterious power in certain numbers like the seven and the nine, and that in permutations to which such numbers may be subjected the most carious result are continually brought to light. The school-boy, however, is not likely, from such phenomena, to draw the conclusion that pure mathematics and exact geometry underlie every process in nature, and determine also every fact and function of what we call life.


EVERY school-boy is aware that there is a mysterious power in certain numbers like the seven and the nine, and that in permutations to which such numbers may be subjected the most carious result are continually brought to light. The school-boy, however, is not likely, from such phenomena, to draw the conclusion that pure mathematics and exact geometry underlie every process in nature, and determine also every fact and function of what we call life.

It is not the object of the present essay to discover a new or to formulate an old hypothesis, but rather to all attention to certain well-known facts and to show that the logical and inevitable deductions that lie very near the surface of all phenomena whatsoever point our a law of nature hitherto overlooked by the western world but well known to the ancients. The apprehension of this law becomes, in the hands of the intelligent and unbiased student, a key to psychology.

I shall assume nothing that is not demonstrable either by scientific research in the realm of physics or by logical reasoning in the realm of metaphysics. These are the two realms in which man’s being exists, and the two methods by which we derive what we call knowledge. Exact observation and correct reasoning are the agencies in all our investigations. As the base and the capital stand to the perfect column, so stand observation and reason to exact knowledge.

The physicist resolves the universe into matter force, or mass and motion; the metaphysician into law and order; the physiologist into structure and function; the psychologist into consciousness and intelligence; while the philosopher, through his apprehension of universal order and harmony-diversity in unity and unity in diversity-sees behind a boundless and eternal nature, an intelligence that works by law and determines evolution.

Knowledge is the combined result of all these forces and processes. Nature, in order to be apprehended, must be viewed and studied from every point of observation. Hence the knower must be at once the physicist, the metaphysician, the physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher. All fragmentary or one-sided views are not only incomplete, they are generally misleading.

Nature exists as an eternal unity, without beginning or end in time; creation and duration are aspects of eternity. What we call “beginning” and “end” are but the succeeding changes when endless duration is broken into fragments called time. Every beginning has been preceded by what we call an ending, or the close of a previous cycle. Every so-called end will be followed by a new beginning, or the dawn of a new cycle.

The first postulate in the last analysis attainable thus far by man is the idea of space. The idea of abstract space is not emptiness but a conditioned fulness. It is the boundless and external potency, continually evolving into universal actuality, and again receding into its source. This appearance and disappearance is periodical and rhythmical, and time is but the measure of its pace. Evolution is the wave of its ebb and flow; the ceaseless impulse that differentiates the one into the many, the universal into the particular, and, in this differentiation, the individual epitomizes the universal.

Every atom, like a mirror, reflects the face of the universe. Space is, therefore, full of substance, and this substance is the root of all matter. Space is full of energy, and this energy is the parent of all force and determines all motion. We have thus a trinity of concepts flowing from out first unity-space-and this trinity is space, substance, and energy. Behind all matter and motion we discern rhythm, order and proportion, or intelligence, and the form of this manifestation, that is, its persistency, recurrence, periodicity, and harmony, we call law. As the whole must necessarily include all of its parts, every essence and phenomenon, manifesting in a part, must be latent in the whole, and this includes life an consciousness.

Starting thus with our concept of boundless and eternal nature, we have universal substance endowed with universal energy, governed by universal law, and manifesting universal life, universal intelligence, and universal consciousness. The terms, ‘living” and “dead,” whether applied to atom or sun, to microbe or to man, are relative only. Back of all apparent death lies the eternal potency that we call life, that has made has made it possible to die.

Back of all apparent unconsciousness lies the universal consciousness from which individual consciousness springs, into which it returns periodically only to again emerge from the latent to the actual or manifesting. Hence are derived the cycles of time, as the cycles of life; the whirling of suns and the circulation of the blood. It is but the motion, the periodicity, the rhythm and harmony of the universal manifesting in the individual.

Here, then, lies the basis of psychology, psyche-logos: a knowledge of the soul. But where is the key to its knowledge and interpretation?.

I us take two functions in man with which we are quite familiar, sight and hearing. With all the diversity and multiplicity of the phenomena of sight and hearing, we find an underlying harmony. If we were never conscious of but one color and one sound, if monochrome and monotone took the place of the endless diversity in these two realms, we would be unconscious of either sound or color. These functions exist only be virtue of diversity in harmony.

To illustrate this, we may imagine ourselves living i a world of absolute light, where no object ever cast a shadow, and from which all gradations of light and darkness had disappeared. The result would be that we could have no knowledge or experience of light at all. Absolute light is thus synonymous with absolute darkness. This concept is the basis of what, in the oldest philosophies, is called the “pairs of opposites.” The same reasoning and the same conclusions are applicable to sound, color, taste, and, finally, to the very basis of mind no less than of sensation. What we call thought is but the changes occurring in our state of consciousness.

To return to our analysis of sight and hearing, we thus see that perception and sensation depend on change and diversity. The basis of all this change is number and harmony. Not only have we primary colors and primary tones, but every color and sound is related to every other in nature by concrete degree, just as every chemical substance has its combining number, and is related to every other substance by a fixed and inherent law of proportion by which it enters into combination. Number also determines form, so that the saying of Plato, that “God geomatrizes” expresses a universal law.

The key-note of all this rhythm and harmony of relation and combination is the septenary, called in music or harmony the “octave.” Every octave is simply a series of septenaries, the last tone of one octave being the first of the succeeding to the human ear and raise the pitch octave after octave until the tone again becomes inaudible to the average ear, science has estimated that about thirty-four octaves would intervene between the vanishing point of sound before reaching those ethereal vibrations which give us the color red of the solar spectrum. What becomes of the vibrations of these intervening octaves?

There are certainly vibrations below these audible to us as above, and colors that our eyes cannot see. The colors of the spectrum from red to violet are as definitely related to each other and to their primaries as are the vibrating notes of a musical scale.

If we discern the underlying principle of medium vibrating rhythmically, according to mathematical proportion, and each sense-perception of a definite sound or color as a response or repetition in consciousness of that particular vibration, we shall discover that every audible sound, and the basis of consciousness of both sound and color a common coefficient of both. In other words, consciousness holds the ground where sound and color merge in one, and sense-perception corresponds to the varying scales of colors and tones.

Thus the perceptions and sensations bear the same relation to consciousness as dose thought, viz., each and all represent changes-orderly and harmonious-in our states of consciousness. The measure of this rhythm, then pattern upon which it rests and builds, is the septenary. That this key-note and octave exist, and are fundamental in nature no less than in man, Professor Crookes has shown in his lecture on the “Origin of the Elements” where elements unite in groups of seven.

Equally remarkable was Deslandre’s account of his discovery of fourteen lines in hydrogen rendered possible by spectral observations of the sun and stars, resulting in the detection of a striking analogy between these lines and certain harmonies of sound. When we remember that hydrogen is the lightest of known gases, and has long been theoretically regarded as the possible basis of all other elements, and believed to be the nearest approach to Professor Crooke’s protyl, we find how closely modern science is trading on the borders of ancient philosophy.

J D Buck