esign themselves to sit through an opera. However, since
the nature and quality of the music does not matter here, we may quote:
"Hearing a Barbary organ in the street, I picture the instrument to
myself. I see the man turning the crank. If military music sounds from
afar, I _see_ a regiment marching." An excellent pianist plays for a
friend Beethoven's sonata in C sharp minor, putting into its execution
all the pathos of which he is capable. The other sees in it "the tumult
and excitement of a fair." Here the musical rendering is misinterpreted
through misapprehension. I have several times noted this--in people
familiar with design or painting, music calls up pictures and various
scenes; one of these persons says that he is "besieged by visual
images." Here the hearing of music evidently acts as excitant.[98]

In a word, insofar as it is permissible in psychology to make use of
general formulas--and with the proviso that they apply to most, not to
all cases--we may say that during the working of the musical imagination
the appearance of visual images is the exception; that when this form of
imagination is weak, the appearance of images is the rule.

Furthermore, this result of observation is altogether in accord with
logic. There is an irreducible antithesis between affective imagination,
the characteristic of which is interiority, and visual imagination,
basically objective. Intellectual language--speech--is an arrangement
of words that stand for objects, qualities, relations, extracts of
things: in order to be understood they must call up in consciousness the
corresponding images. Emotional language--music--is an appropriate
ordering of successive or simultaneous sounds, of melodies and harmonies
that are signs of affective states: in order to be understood, they must
call up in consciousness the corresponding affective modifications. But,
in the non-musically inclined, the evocative power is small--sonorous
combinations excite only superficial and unstable internal states. The
exterior excitation, that of the sounds, follows the line of least
resistance, and acting according to the psychic nature of the
individual, tends to arouse objective images, pictures, visual
representations, well or ill adapted.

To sum up: In contrast to sensorial imagination, which has its origin
without, affective imagination begins within. The _stuff_ of its
creation is found in the mental states enumerated above, and in their
innumerab