Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/372

358 of the same organs of hearing and of the auditory centers appertaining to them must produce different effects on the "soul" according to its degree of development. The "soul" is in a manner played upon by the musical movements of the auditory centers as if it was an instrument; the more complete the instrument, the greater the effect. Hence the comprehension of our music by the highest animals—the dog, the cat, and the horse—is exceedingly imperfect, because of their limited mental development. Music strikes them as pleasant or unpleasant, or attracts them, independently of what we call the character of the piece. The same differences, except in a lesser degree, must prevail in the different stages of development of the human soul. If the primitive man did not have a mind equal to ours; if man's intellect and all that depends upon it has been growing sharper and more profound during the thousands of years of his struggle for existence, his faculty for comprehending music must also have been enlarged in the course of time. For this reason we can not suppose that any Beethovens were concealed among primitive men, or are running around among contemporary Australians or negroes. For that is needed, not only a strongly cultivated musical sense, but also a rich, great, deeply emotional soul such as accompanies an intellect schooled according to the sum of its experiences. I will go further, and say that I do not believe that a child of one of these primitive men, if he were given to us to-day, could be trained to the same degree of musical appreciation as our children are capable of. The native higher mental faculties would be wanting in him. While savages are lower in mental development than civilized man, and while we recognize that man's receptivity for music has grown with his mental development, we must doubt if any increase in the power of the human mind has taken place in historical times. The civilized natives of antiquity appear to have already reached a very high degree of mental capacity; and their lawgivers, poets, philosophers, architects, and sculptors have had no successors superior to them. We have a right to suppose also that the ancients had the same musical sense and talent for music as we; and that, if their music was inferior, it was not for lack in that direction, but for the want of the products of the continued exercise of the musical talent—of invention and discovery—acquired and transmitted from generation to generation, and added to, by the aid of which we have reached our high degree of cultivation. Although man's physical power may not increase, we have a right to expect an almost unlimited advance of mankind in mental cultivation, by each generation building upon the stage which its predecessor had reached, and thus continuing perpetually to go higher.