Sound contains three sounds: That of the tonic, the dominant, and the mediant. The tonic (Father) necessarily generates the dominant (Son), and the mediant (Holy Ghost) proceeds necessarily from the first two.
Pythagoras discovered this 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 reünion 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 movement is called the will. The will, therefore, becomes the active principle in virtue of which speech is expressed; thus speech is the express agent of the will. It is speech, in fact, which, under the incubation of this mysterious power, rules, groups and moves bodies with the aid of memory.
Inflection is the life of speech; the mind lies in the articulative values, in the distribution of these articulations and their progressions. The soul of speech is in gesture.