358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the same organs of hearing and of the auditory centers apper- 

 taining to them must produce different effects on the " soul " ac- 

 cording to its degree of development. The * soul * is in a manner 

 played upon by the musical movements of the auditory centers as 

 if it was an instrument ; the more complete the instrument, the 

 greater the effect. Hence the comprehension of our music by the 

 highest animals — the dog, the cat, and the horse — is exceedingly 

 imperfect, because of their limited mental development. Music 

 strikes them as pleasant or unpleasant, or attracts them, independ- 

 ently of what we call the character of the piece. The same dif- 

 ferences, except in a lesser degree, must prevail in the different 

 stages of development of the human soul. If the primitive man 

 did not have a mind equal to ours ; if man's intellect and all that 

 depends upon it has been growing sharper and more profound 

 during the thousands of years of his struggle for existence, his 

 faculty for comprehending music must also have been enlarged 

 in the course of time. For this reason we can not suppose that 

 any Beethovens were concealed among primitive men, or are run- 

 ning around among contemporary Australians or negroes. For 

 that is needed, not only a strongly cultivated musical sense, but 

 also a rich, great, deeply emotional soul such as accompanies an 

 intellect schooled according to the sum of its experiences. I 

 will go further, and say that I do not believe that a child of 

 one of these primitive men, if he were given to us to-day, could be 

 trained to the same degree of musical appreciation as our children 

 are capable of. The native higher mental faculties would be 

 wanting in him. "While savages are lower in mental development 

 than civilized man, and while we recognize that man's receptivity 

 for music has grown with his mental development, we must doubt 

 if any increase in the power of the human mind has taken place 

 in historical times. The civilized natives of antiquity appear to 

 have already reached a very high degree of mental capacity ; and 

 their lawgivers, poets, philosophers, architects, and sculptors have 

 had no successors superior to them. We have a right to suppose 

 also that the ancients had the same musical sense and talent for 

 music as we ; and that, if their music was inferior, it was not for 

 lack in that direction, but for the want of the products of the 

 continued exercise of the musical talent — of invention and dis- 

 covery — acquired and transmitted from generation to generation, 

 and added to, by the aid of which we have reached our high de- 

 gree of cultivation. Although man's physical power may not 

 increase, we have a right to expect an almost unlimited advance 

 of mankind in mental cultivation, by each generation building 

 upon the stage which its predecessor had reached, and thus con- 

 tinuing perpetually to go higher. 



