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In the language of an impassioned man Spencer finds all the elements of melody: burst of sound, quality or timbre, pitch, intervals, relative quickness of variations. All these phenomena, the physiological effects of psychological states (pleasure and pain), are in vocal music carried to their highest degree. This Spencerian theory is by no means new; we find its essential idea in many works of the eighteenth century. In spite of the many facts and examples offered by Spencer in support of his view, it needs but little musical sense to recognize its many weaknesses. Music has for its base the scale, which does not exist in speech. It is a system which rests partially on objective laws of sound, partially on convention. The scale is a work of art, a creation of the æsthetical sense. Spencer ignores this element. Further, he regards song as the exaggeration of instinctive speech. To exaggerate means to falsify. Melodies produced on this principle would be to true music what caricatures are to sculpture. We also demand of music that it be beautiful. Spencer fails to tell us whence we get this element. Besides, passion has some ugly physiological effects. Why does the musician relieve these by means of the beautiful? If Spencer were right anybody could be a musician. Finally, the most important element of music, that which no empirical theory can explain, is the musical thought. The most expressive timbres are meaningless without a unifying idea. This faculty of thinking in sounds is the result of a long cultivation of the æsthetical sense. The musical mind has grown from the language of sensation to that of abstraction. "Every musical thought is, at the same time, an imitation of the external world or at least an expression of feeling; every imitation of the external world or every expression of feeling is, at the same time, a musical thought."

Volition is neither a complexus of sensations nor a special faculty, but psychical force. Every state of consciousness is idea in so far as it involves discrimination (discernment), force in so far as it involves preference. Feeling and reaction are inseparable. Each particular sensation depends on the general sensibility, each particular reaction on the general activity. F. does not mean by idea a kind of psychical atom. There is no simple state of consciousness, every state being the resultant of an immense amount of action and reaction between us and the external world. Nor are the diverse states of consciousness and