Myths to Live By

Music and the arts, according to this early view, were to put us in mind of those harmonies, from which the general thoughts and affairs of this earth distract us. And in the Middle Ages the seven branches of learning were accordingly associated with those spheres: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (known as the trivium), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the quadrivium).

moreover, made a music, the “music of the spheres,” to which the notes of our diatonic scale correspond. There was also a metal associated with each: silver, mercury, copper, gold, iron, tin, and lead, in that order. And the soul descending from heaven to be born on earth picked up, as it came down, the qualities of those metals; so that our souls and bodies are compounds of the very elements of the universe and sing, so to say, the same song.

The more seriously considered medieval concept, however, was that of the ancient Greeks, according to whom the earth was not flat, but a solid stationary sphere in the center of a kind of Chinese box of seven transparent revolving spheres, in each of which there was a visible planet: the moon, Mercury, Venus, and the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the same seven after which our days of the week are named.

The seminal mind of Peter Cooper (1791–1883)—the radical, free-thinking inventor, moneymaker, and politician, the first real feminist of New York—conceived, among other great things, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Cooper was disturbed by his own lack of education and by the knowledge that education was in his time conceived to be for the wealthy and for men alone. He changed both concepts, stimulated probably by the Chautauqua movement and the deeds of certain other philanthropists. His big and primary contribution was the idea of The Forum and adult education, which produced the first adult education college of this nation.