These prolongations do not invalidate the law, instead they confirm it in freedom and newness. Thus our masters through observation of fundamental line, harmony, and selection of intervals could now unfold a freedom in the voice-leading, of whose mighty measurements one could not form even one idea until today, since one neither understood the law of strict composition in its depths, nor assumed it in such prolongations. And so it came, that the recently deceased youth, who apparently still lives among us, could have hit upon the idea of being obliged to conquer its freedom of voice-leading quite impudently, as if it had not already long since possessed the highest freedom, one completely uncomprehended by him. And indeed he accomplished the slaying of the time-tested freedom, since he exulted in his ignorance contrary to the law. That harmony and selection of intervals come from the fundamental line and agree with it, constitutes the wonder of the cycle.
Diminution is to the fundamental line as thriving flesh is to the human skeleton.
Immediately, it indeed appeals to form and content of the flesh, but the secret of the skeleton holds everything together. Each shudders at bad creation which is an agony to the eye. It is previously commanded to him. Historically, it may suffice just so much to know that, centuries ago, diminution followed its nature in the embellishing of a single succession of tones, in order to marvel at at the modest size of the common imagination, which, now turned around, does not find the way back from the diminutions of our masters to a single succession of tones. For in the first place, monody was also diminution of a single succession of tones, even though of a different nature than the ornament, and secondly it certainly wasted the contrapuntal art, but not the counterpoint, which must appear immediately wherever two voices move in relation to each other.