lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

p. 83-84: Descartes made one of the first attempts to explain the concept of the affections in his last book, The Passions of the Soul of 1649 …. Descarte’s book was followed a year later by the Musurgia universalis of the “last Renaissance man,,” Athanasius Kircher …. Kircher was very much a believer in music not only as a mirror but as a fundamental element of Creation itself …; music was not so much a reflection or approximation of God’s perfect design, but an emanation of the divine Itself. Kircher’s motto was: “Music is nothing other than the knowledge or the order of all things.”

James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.