ed and set vibrating in an
unusual fashion, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after much
premonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, might
hardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but an
immense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony by
a sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the parts
become distinct and their relation vital.

[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility.]

Such elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best
trained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies
prodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given
conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is
there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed
circumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony
might be felt at once, if the musician's power of sustained or
cumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and
their interval in one sensation (actual experience being always
transitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind might
survey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would be
transcended in such an experience; the apperception would still have
duration and the object would still have successive features, for
evidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while all
sensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant in
passing. But the passing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents some
experience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present a
temporal sequence with any number of members, according to the synthetic
and analytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious and
formless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as they
say, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafening
discord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear the
parts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education is
necessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music;
it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills.

[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them.]

The degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacity
possessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man's
synthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit is
exhausting. Excitement the