I keep thinking of more.... For instance, I have recently been reading the mesmerising prose of Sir Thomas Browne - a widely travelled, well-educated, devout Puritan with an interest in science. In his "Religio Medici" (written while Newton was barely out of baby clothes) Sir Thomas has this to say about music:
" Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of GOD; such a melody to the ear, as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of GOD. It unties the ligaments of my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself and by degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven. I will not say, with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto Musick."
