conventional basis of agreement does not exist.

Music may thus convey a message to one person and not to another: it may
be "pure music" carrying no emotion to this man, and yet it may convey
something peculiarly definite, to the mind of the other. The message is
not a thing of which we can logically argue "either it is, or it is
not": both statements may be true. Sound exists in the form of
vibration, but if I am deaf I cannot hear it: it has no existence--FOR
ME. The problem thus centres itself largely in the mind of the
individual rather than in the question whether there is or is not a
message and a meaning. Not only music, but the whole world is brimming
over with messages and meanings which our dull senses cannot appreciate.
The folk who populate this globe are largely dead. They answer to such a
limited range of interests and sensations that they cannot in any real
sense be said to be "alive."

The message of music may be a very gossamer thing, it may be far too
tenuous to be expressed in words, though possibly it might be conveyed
eloquently enough in some of the sister Arts, in dancing, posture,
gesture, or in facial expression. "Pour not out words where there is a
musician," says the writer in Ecclesiasticus. The message may scarcely
be a thought, or emotion, or even an idea: it may simply be a mood.
Words so often become our masters instead of our servants, and we are
apt to think that if a thing cannot be reduced to a verbal formula it is
an airy nothing, a figment of the imagination. So it may be, but it is
none the less real. We have thought of ourselves as material individuals
for so long that it is difficult for us to use other than material
standards in our estimate of immaterial things: hence our confusion. We
can feel a thousand things far too delicate to explain or express, joys
too exquisite to voice, doubts too tenuous to utter, and griefs too
heavy to be borne: we could not put them on paper, nor submit to be
cross-examined as to their reality and substance, but there they are,
and not all the argument in the world could impugn their reality to us.
What is the most emotional of all the Arts? Music. No art has a deeper
power of penetration, no other can render shades of feeling so
delicate."[22]

[Note 22: Ribot. "Psychology of the Emotions."]

Let us take a concrete example: the change from the major to the minor
mode carries with it a change of sentiment. We feel that, quite
noticeably, th