While the mu­si­cal dis­cus­sion be­tween our feel­ing and our un­der­stand­ing ad­vances the proc­ess of find­ing truth and thus, in the proc­ess of gain­ing knowl­edge in mu­sic, sys­tem­ati­cally puts us into the po­si­tion of a crea­tor of mu­sic, the “dis­pute” is the cli­max of this de­vel­op­ment.
This “dis­pute” is the very logi­cal re­sult of the mu­si­cal path of knowl­edge taken up in the dis­cus­sion.

The term “dis­pute” is com­monly as­so­ci­ated with some kind of nega­tive dis­cus­sion.
Here, how­ever, the term “dis­pute” only de­nies the ex­clu­sive ex­is­tence of unity within the har­mony – unity to the ex­clu­sion of eve­ry­thing else, some­thing our un­der­stand­ing tried to avoid in its rela­tive proc­ess of know­ing be­cause it ap­peared too sim­ple, not di­verse enough.

No sooner had our un­der­stand­ing reached the height of the har­mony, and no sooner was it inundated there with the quali­ties of pure self-aware­ness, than it real­ized that here, in the field of the har­mony, it was sud­denly and un­ex­pect­edly on a com­pletely new level of su­preme mu­si­cal knowl­edge.

And at the bright height of its to­tal cog­ni­tive abil­ity, our un­der­stand­ing now real­izes that, when ex­am­ined very closely, the unity of the har­mony com­pletely un­ex­pect­edly re­veals an in­fi­nite mul­ti­plic­ity.

From the state of rela­tive wak­ing-con­scious­ness the un­der­stand­ing would never have ex­pected this wealth, be­cause dur­ing the mu­si­cal proc­ess of know­ing – as seen from the un­der­stand­ing – sim­plic­ity had only in­creased, while con­se­quently the di­ver­sity had con­tinu­ally be­come less and less dis­tinct.

How­ever, with this as­sump­tion in the rela­tive mu­si­cal cog­ni­tive proc­ess, our un­der­stand­ing is in error owing to a lack of its own in­ner enliv­en­ment. Due to its in­er­tia, it had not enough sen­si­tiv­ity to per­ceive di­ver­sity in the spaces of a higher mu­si­cal or­der with the same dis­tinc­tion as in the spaces of a lower mu­si­cal or­der.

In the motif-space, for ex­ample, the un­der­stand­ing no longer per­ceived the mani­fold tones which it had so clearly rec­og­nized in the mu­si­cal tone-space: be­cause tonal mul­ti­plic­ity ad­heres to the mo­tifs only as much as, for ex­ample, the fat of a ball of butter sticks to the hand af­ter the butter has been thrown away – while the ball is far away, travelling the course that is de­ter­mined by the hand.