Each tone of the melody de­ter­mines all tones past and all those yet to come. Un­der the aus­pices of the se­quence, the me­lodic guid­ance struc­tures it­self from the world of the har­mony. From here, past, pre­sent, and fu­ture can not only be com­pre­hended, but even in­flu­enced.

This al­most un­be­liev­able mas­tery over even the past is not based on any outer act of will, but on in­tui­tion, and is not con­trolled through the fac­ulty of un­der­stand­ing; it hap­pens in­no­cently, from the deep­est depth of feel­ing, with­outh analytic in­ten­tion.

If a com­poser lacks a natu­ral mas­tery over this fun­da­men­tal power of in­tui­tion, then mu­si­cal art is not pos­si­ble. The mu­si­cian, who is sup­posed to sim­ply say the truth, be­comes an in­ter­preter, a transcriber of truth, who tries to de­scribe in­fin­ity from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent men­tal realm, i.e. from his own, finite world – with­out suc­cess, be­cause of his lack of cog­ni­tive power.

Based on this in­sight, one may say that the over­tone mo­tifs, ac­tive within the sound, are re­lated to the ap­par­ent mo­tifs – which are noth­ing but suc­cessions of tones – in the same way as some­one’s in­ner un­fold­ment of per­son­al­ity is re­lated to his outer ac­tiv­ity.

If this “in­ner ac­tiv­ity” of the over­tone mo­tifs does not take place in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic, it cor­re­sponds to the move­ments of a robot, which may look like hu­man yet has no life.