Time for another quote. This time it’s from  British biologist and scientific writer Thomas Henrey Huxley (1825-1895), who’s passage on how the principle of Unity in Variety can relate to ideas and music I really like:

‘I cannot give you any example of a thorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely real than a pleasure of this kind-the pleasure which arises in one’s mind when a whole mass of different structures run into one harmony as the expression of a central law – it has often occurred to me that the pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind [Bach’s fugues] is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is exactly the same as in most of my problems in morphology-that you have the theme in one of the old master’s works followed out in all its endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of unity in variety.’

Thomas Henry Huxley in ‘On Science and Art in Relation to Education'(1882 (1725, p.10);