joy; and similarly with all other intervals, phrases, and cadences?  Few will be so irrational as to think this.  Is it, then, that the meanings of these special combinations are conventional only?—­that we learn their implications, as we do those of words, by observing how others understand them?  This is an hypothesis not only devoid of evidence, but directly opposed to the experience of every one.  How, then, are musical effects to be explained?  If the theory above set forth be accepted, the difficulty disappears.  If music, taking for its raw material the various modifications of voice which are the physiological results of excited feelings, intensifies, combines, and complicates them—­if it exaggerates the loudness, the resonance, the pitch, the intervals, and the variability, which, in virtue of an organic law, are the characteristics of passionate speech—­if, by carrying out these further, more consistently, more unitedly, and more sustainedly, it produces an idealised language of emotion; then its power over us becomes comprehensible.  But in the absence of this theory, the expressiveness of music appears to be inexplicable.

Again, the preference we feel for certain qualities of sound presents a like difficulty, admitting only of a like solution.  It is generally agreed that the tones of the human voice are more pleasing than any others.  Grant that music takes its rise from the modulations of the human voice under emotion, and it becomes a natural consequence that the tones of that voice should appeal to our feelings more than any others; and so should be considered more beautiful than any others.  But deny that music has this origin, and the only alternative is the untenable position that the vibrations proceeding from a vocalist’s throat are, objectively considered, of a higher order than those from a horn or a violin.  Similarly with harsh and soft sounds.  If the conclusiveness of the foregoing reasonings be not admitted, it must be supposed that the vibrations causing the last are intrinsically better than those causing the first; and that, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, the higher feelings and natures produce the one, and the lower the other.  But if the foregoing reasonings be valid, it follows, as a matter of course, that we shall like the sounds that habitually accompany agreeable feelings, and dislike those that habitually accompany disagreeable feelings.

Once more, the question—­How is the expressiveness of music to be otherwise accounted for? may be supplemented by the question—­How is the genesis of music to be otherwise accounted for?  That music is a product of civilisation is manifest; for though savages have their dance-chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be dignified by the title musical:  at most, they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music, properly so called.  And if music has been by slow steps developed in the course of civilisation, it must have been developed out of something.  If, then, its origin is not that above alleged, what is its origin?