Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/441

No. 4.] exile among the mountains, taking his piano with him, and who, returning after several years, found every other piano painfully out of tune. How shall we explain all this? Not by the length, number, or strength of sound vibrations in the abstract, surely; for these and their mathematical relations are always the same. But to the relations between use and development of specific cells and fibres, and between such development and the distribution of specific pain nerves, the whole set of circumstances is easily reconcilable. With increased study and cultivation of music comes more frequent occurrence of unusual combinations and harmonies. With great and daring musicians the increase of such above the ordinary past experiences of the human race would be considerable, even as a morphological factor. It is fair to suppose that the cells and fibres of tones but infrequently heard before would now tend to develop, — those which involved pain as well as the others. The complicated apparatus of tone cells and fibres would be likely to get far more of the new exercise than would the simpler pain nerve fibres and so develop more and faster. Again, the apparatus for tone outmeasuring in bulk that for pain, even if the increased growth were but proportional to the bulk to be developed, we should soon have the tone apparatus crowding that of pain into atrophy. It is likely that still other conditions of arrangements, spatial and functional, would encourage such a process. Thus we should here have a process corresponding to the culture of music crowding out the pain nerves from tones and combination-tones previously representing the margin of the harmful as developed by the sum of former experiences, the said pain nerves now being useless or, rather, obstructive to the new circumstances of experience. By the early cultivation of music the Greeks had come to hear 'thirds' without discomfort. By a continuation of the same process Handel came to accept 'fourths'; through Beethoven we grew to 'fifths,' and eventually, no doubt, the musical world will find no discomfort in the now, to some, intolerable discords of Wagner. If the above explanations are correct, certain chords not too excessively disagreeable for morphological experiment ought to be modified