Dedication to Lord James
by Johannes Kepler
Here are the reasons why I transferred these books on Harmony away from the court of Germany into England.
- It is my duty to show how you are farsighted and benevolent, and therefore can extinguish the civil war and bring harmony.
You have studied Platonic learning. In your youth, you deemed the astronomy of Tycho Brahe, on which this work depends, worthy of the ornaments of your talent.
- I first conceived in my mind the material of the work a little less than twenty years ago,*’ and gave it its title, when I had not yet discovered the proper motions of the planets, though nature’s in stinct declared that the harmonies were in them.
Even then I intended to place the work, if ever it were to prosper and be completed, under your Majesty’s patronage; and I bore witness of this, as it were, vow of mine time and again to your representatives at the imperial court. The reasons for thinking of this patronage for my Harmony were sup plied by that manifold dissonance in human affairs, which is indeed obvious, so that it cannot fail to offend, though it is compounded of melodic and distinct intervals, the nature of which is to mollify the hearing in the midst of the dissonance with the promise of the pleas ing consonance which is to succeed, and to sustain it in the expecta tion of the same. For indeed it was a belief worthy of a Christian man that it was God who regulated all the melody of human life, and a patience worthy of the greatness of God not to be offended by the diffuseness of the dissonances, nor to abandon hopes, reflecting that it is not the providence of God which acts slowly, but the space of our individual lifetimes which is so swiftly fleeting. For my part I learned from the sacred oracles that all things have been destined by God for
