Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/438

 426 EDMUND GUENEY I "WHAT IS AN EMOTION?" are far most markedly connected. Such effects no doubt often accompany the genuinely musical hearing of music the mode of hearing which instinctively takes account of the form ; but rarely, I think in dissociation, from mass and colour of a satisfactory sort. If I may speak of myself, there is plenty of music from which I have received as much emotion in silent representation as when presented by the finest orchestra ; but it is with the latter condi- tion that I almost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and hair- stirring. But to call my enjoyment of the form, of the note-after-noteness, of a favourite melody a mere critical " judgment of right," would really be to deny me the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate experience in English. It is quin- tessentially emotion whether due to mere "cerebral forms of pleasure and displeasure," or connected with remote associational sources, I need not here discuss. Now there are hundreds of other bits of music, similar to these in all external ways in all points that are verbally definable which I judge to be right without receiving an iota of the emotion. For purposes of emo- tion, they are to me like geometrical demonstrations, or like acts of integrity performed in Peru. I think that Prof. James is bound to accept my experience as I have stated it ; but then he will have to answer me this. If the cerebral centre or centres which are primarily affected merely give the sense of rightn<;^, and the secondary reverberation from the muscles, skin, and viscera superadds the emotion, why does one rightness evoke the reverberation, and not the other ? I only know that the two bits of musical movement differ qualitatively by the presence to one, and the absence from the other, of an emotional power : why should my brain-centres know better than I, and send down a summons to my body to reverberate when Beethoven is " right," and not when Clement! is " right " ? So when Prof. James says that " in every art there is the keen perception of certain rela- tions being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill consequent thereupon ; and these are two things, not one," I reply that though logically they may be two, experientially they are often one. To the example which I have chosen the doctrine would indeed hardly apply even logically. For the emotion which the musical layman receives is not " consequent " upon the perception of any relations which can be marked out and justified as right apart from emotion ; that sort of rightness is caviare to him. But the veriest layman may maintain that, in writing a movement of a sonata, it is more right to produce a musical organism than a musical corpse ; and when the two movements are produced, emotion is the only test for deciding which of them is alive and which dead. But I am outrunning my space. I will only suggest, in con- clusion, that if the above argument is valid in the case of any- thing with so large an element of sense in it as music, it must surely apply a fortiori to moral and intellectual fitnesses.