Page:Sphere and Duties of Government.djvu/120

100 of previous culture is the just standard of appreciation. Energy appears to me to be the first and chiefest of human virtues. Whatever exalts our energy is of greater worth than aught that merely puts materials into our hands for its exercise. Now, as it is characteristic of man's nature to perceive only one thing at once, that will most affect it which represents only one object at one time; and as, in a series of successive sensations, each possesses a certain degree which is produced by all the preceding sensations, and acts upon all those which follow it, that series will have the greatest effect in which the single parts consist together in a perfectly similar relation. Now all this is true of music. The exact sequence of time, moreover, is its peculiar and essential property; this is all that is decided in it. The series which it presents but feebly impels us to any definite sensation. It gives us a theme, to which we can supply infinite texts; and that which the hearer really inter- weaves with this basis, in so far as he is, in general, con- genially disposed, springs up freely and naturally from the very fulness of his soul; and the latter more readily and eagerly embraces it than anything else that is actually supplied or intruded on our sensations, which often engrosses us more from its being perceived rather than felt. As it does not belong to me to examine the nature and properties of music, I will not stay to observe its other striking characteristics, such as that it evokes tones from natural objects, and therein keeps closer to nature than painting, sculpture, or poetry. I only wished, in introducing it, to illustrate more clearly the different character of sensuous impressions.

But the manner of influence just described, is not peculiar to music alone. Kant observes it to be possible with a union of shifting colours, and it characterizes still more