ultimately enable men vividly and completely to impress on each other
all the emotions which they experience from moment to moment.

Thus if, as we have endeavoured to show, it is the function of music to
facilitate the development of this emotional language, we may regard
music as an aid to the achievement of that higher happiness which it
indistinctly shadows forth. Those vague feelings of unexperienced
felicity which music arouses--those indefinite impressions of an unknown
ideal life which it calls up, may be considered as a prophecy, to the
fulfilment of which music is itself partly instrumental. The strange
capacity which we have for being so affected by melody and harmony may
be taken to imply both that it is within the possibilities of our nature
to realise those intenser delights they dimly suggest, and that they are
in some way concerned in the realisation of them. On this supposition
the power and the meaning of music become comprehensible; but otherwise
they are a mystery.

We will only add, that if the probability of these corollaries be
admitted, then music must take rank as he highest of the fine arts--as
the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare. And
thus, even leaving out of view the immediate gratifications it is hourly
giving, we cannot too much applaud that progress of musical culture
which is becoming one of the characteristics of our age.

[1] _Fraser's Magazine_, October 1857.

[2] Those who seek information on this point may find it in an
interesting tract by Mr. Alexander Bain, on _Animal Instinct and
Intelligence_.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Education and Kindred
Subjects, by Herbert Spencer

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