; and woe betide us
if we receive the answer to the one question as the answer to the other;
if we let the knowledge of what things are serve us instead of the
instinct of what things should do; if we let scientific analysis step
into the place of ethical or aesthetical judgment; and if, in the domain
of art or of morals we think to substitute a system of alembics and
microscopes for that strange intangible mechanism which science tells us
does not exist, and which indeed science can never see or clutch, our
soul. For science has a singular contempt for all that is without its
domain; it seeks for truth, but when truth baffles and eludes it,
science will turn towards falsehood; it will deny what it cannot prove,
and call God himself a brain-phantom because he cannot be vivisected.
So, when logic, which can solve only logical propositions, remains
without explanation before the dicta of the moral and aesthetic parts of
us, it simply denies the existence of such dicta and replaces them by
its own formulae; if we ask for the aim of things and actions, it tells
us their origin; if we trustingly ask when we should admire beauty and
love virtue, it drops the rainbow into its crucible to discover its
chemical components, and dissects the brain of a saint to examine the
shape of its convolutions; it meets admiration and love with experiment
and analysis, and, where we are required to judge, tells us we can only
examine. Thus, as in ethics, so also in aesthetics, modern philosophy
has given us the means instead of the aim, the analysis instead of the
judgment; let us therefore ask it only how much of human character and
emotion music _can_ express; the question how much of it music _ought_
to express must be answered by something else: by that artistic instinct
whose composition and mechanism and origin scientific psychology may
perhaps some day explain, but whose unformulated, inarticulate,
half-unconscious dicta all the scientific and logical formulae in the
world can never replace. As yet, however, we have to deal only with the
question how much of human character and emotion music can express, and
by what means it does so; and here modern psychology, or rather the
genius of Herbert Spencer, is able to answer us. Why does dance music
cheer us, and military music inspirit us, and sacred music make us
solemn? A vague sense of the truth made aestheticians answer, for
well-nigh two centuries, "by the force of association." Dance mu