DKEAMS AND ILLUSIONS. 295 



proceeded. The arts also, like other human products, 

 follow the general evolution of myth in their historic 

 course ; the primitive fetish is afterwards perfected by 

 more explicit spiritual beliefs, and is combined with 

 cosmic myths ; these are slowly transformed into 

 symbolic representations, which dissolve in their 

 turn, and give place to the expression of the truth 

 and to forms which more fully satisfy the natural 

 sense of beauty and its adaptation to special ends. 



The arts of singing and of instrumental music 

 have the same origin and evolution as the others. 

 Vico, Strabo, and others have asserted that primitive 

 men spoke in song, and there is great truth in the 

 remark. Since gesture and pantomime help out the 

 meaning of imperfect speech, which was at first poor 

 in the number of words and their relative forms, and 

 this is still the case among many peoples, so song, 

 vocal modulation, and the rhythmic expression of 

 speech seem to stimulate emotion. In truth, the 

 mental and physiological effort which tends by vocal 

 enunciation to present the image or emotion in an 

 external form, is on the one hand not yet fully 

 disintegrated, and on the other the greater or less 

 intensity of feeling involved in primitive languages a 

 corresponding vocal modulation to supplement it, just 

 as it required gesture and pantomime. Thus speech, 

 gesture, and song, in the larger sense of the word, had 

 their origin together. This is also true of many of 

 the languages of modern savages, and of those of 



