remembered expression, passes into
convention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, and
impersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably have
little pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds as
with other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be shocking and
well-nigh impossible, yet to repeat them serves no end further than to
avoid a sense of strangeness or inhibition. These automatisms, however,
in working themselves out, are not without certain retroactive effects:
they leave the system exhausted or relieved, and they have meantime
played more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make
automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may
even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side.
The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in
proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic
performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and
criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be
consecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his
improvisation with its subject and function, and thus he develops what
is called style and taste.

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

[Sidenote: Music is a world apart.]

Sound readily acquires ideal values. It has power in itself to engross
attention and at the same time may be easily diversified, so as to
become a symbol for other things. Its direct empire is to be compared
with that of stimulants and opiates, yet it presents to the mind, as
these do not, a perception that corresponds, part by part, with the
external stimulus. To hear is almost to understand. The process we
undergo in mathematical or dialectical thinking is called understanding,
because a natural sequence is there adequately translated into ideal
terms. Logical connections seem to be internally justified, while only
the fact that we perceive them here and now, with more or less facility,
is attributed to brute causes. Sound approaches this sort of ideality;
it presents to sense something like the efficacious structure of the
object. It is almost mathematical; but like mathematics it is adequate
only by being abstract; and while it discloses point by point one strain
in existence, it leaves many other strains, which in fact are interwoven
with it, wholly out of account. Music is accordingly, like mathematics,
very nearly a world by itself; it c