he
intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or,
like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of his
native land: --

Take me somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no ten commandments
And a man may raise a thirst.

Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery of the
desert and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an argosy be
poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no
resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real
sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its power.
The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable; but the superiority
of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety
of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty
of those that can at any time be felt.

_Sound._

Sec. 16. Sound shares with the lower senses the disadvantage of
having no intrinsic spatial character; it, therefore, forms no part of
the properly abstracted external world, and the pleasures of the ear
cannot become, in the literal sense, qualities of _things._ But there
is in sounds such an exquisite and continuous gradation in pitch,
and such a measurable relation in length, that an object almost as
complex and describable as the visible one can be built out of
them. What gives spatial forms their value in description of
the environment is the ease with which discriminations and
comparisons can be made in spatial objects: they are measurable,
while unspatial sensations commonly are not. But sounds are also
measurable in their own category: they have comparable pitches
and durations, and definite and recognizable combinations of those
sensuous elements are as truly _objects_ as chairs and tables. Not
that a musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a portion
of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but that, for a
critical philosophy, visible objects are also nothing but possibilities
of sensation. The real world is merely the shadow of that assurance
of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This objectivity
can accrue to any mental figment that has enough cohesion,
content, and individuality to be describable and recognizable, and
these qualities belong no less to audible than to spatial ideas.

There is, accordingly, some justification in Schopenhauer's
speculative assertion that music repeats th