law. Passing before a blacksmith's shop, he
heard the sound of heavy hammer strokes upon a forge. He recognized
perfectly that each blow gave out beside the principal tone (tonic) two
other tones, which corresponded to the twelfth and seventeenth of the
tonic. Now, the twelfth reversed is nothing but the fifth or dominant,
and the seventeenth becomes, by a double reversion, the third or mediant
of the tonic.

Let us say, then, that every tone necessarily contains the tonic its
generator, the dominant its engendered, and the mediant which proceeds
from the other two. The reuenion of these three tones which makes them
into one, forms the perfect chord. Full and absolute consonance is the
expression of union, of love, of order, of harmony, of peace; it is the
return to the source of goodness, to God.

If a fourth form should be added to the perfect chord, to consonance,
there would necessarily be a dissonance. This fourth can only enter by
an effort, almost by violence. It is outside of plenitude, of the calm
established by the Divine law; it produces a painful sensation, a
dissonance. As soon as there is a discord, a dissonance, the animal
cries out, the dog howls, inert bodies suffer and vibrate; but all is
order and calm again when consonance returns.

Speech.

Speech is an act posterior to will, itself posterior to love; this again
posterior to judgment, posterior in its turn to memory, which, finally,
is posterior to the impression.

Every impression, to become a sensation, must first be perceived by the
intelligence, and thus we may say of the sensation that it is a definite
impression. But, to be definite, it must pass into the domain of memory
and there solicit the reappearance of its congeners with which it may
identify itself. It is in this apparatus and surrounded by this throng
of homogeneous impressions which gather round it, as if by magic, or
rather which it draws about it as the magnet draws the iron, it is, I
say, in this complex state that it appears before the intelligence to
receive from the latter a fitting name. For the intelligence could not
give it a name if the homogeneous impressions in which it has, so to
speak, arrayed itself, did not serve to point it out.

Now, by this distinction, established by the double operation of the
memory and the intelligence, a movement takes place in the soul, of
attraction, if the intelligence approve; or of repulsion, if it
disapprove. This moveme