Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony

The many contributions of the renowned philologist Leo Spitzer in the fields of etymology and style in many of the Romantic languages are widely recognized and highly valued. Less well known, but equally attractive, is his extensive work on what he called "historical semantics," a study illustrated in his treatise "Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony." The key to this study is Spitzer's use of the term mind, preferring more mundane descriptors such as "intellectual history" or "history of thought." For Spitzer, spirit represents the "unity of feeling and thought", "atmosphere" or "climate of opinion" that he is looking for. The present work, however, is more than a casual example of Spitzer's method, because its very theme - "state of mind" or "world harmony" - perfectly represents Spitzer's understanding of spirit; that is, his conception of the unity of the European spirit, the old-world feeling for an ordered, even musically ordered universe. This exceptionally fascinating volume is not just an academic treatise on historical semantics;  is itself an astonishing display of world harmony as a creed - a living demonstration that "everything is everything", that everything is related to everything: the planets and the sounds, the colors  and sounds that are heard, the rhyme and the nature, the echo and the song of the birds.