DREAMS AND ILLUSIONS. 



305 



and joy, while the minor key excites languor and 

 invincible sadness, and animals are affected in the 

 same way. 



It is evident that the formation of the scale, the 

 essential foundation of music, varies with the epoch, 

 climate, habits, and physiological conditions of the 

 different races which have successively adopted the 

 diatonic, the major, and minor scales. The music of the 

 Chinese differs from our own, and while it is equally 

 elaborate, it does not quite please us, and the same may 

 be said of the music of the Indians, of the ancient 

 Egyptians, and others. Undoubtedly our scale is 

 more convenient and conformable to art, setting aside 

 the ph*ysiological conditions of race, since the notes 

 separated by regular intervals form a more spiritual 

 and independent, in short a more artistic system. 



Such are briefly the characteristics of the genesis 

 of song and of music, the actual conditions which 

 make them possible, and their effect on man and 

 animals. We must now consider the subject from the 

 mythical point of view, as we have done in the case 

 of the other arts. We know that the image and 

 emotions are mythically personified by us, and this 

 fanciful reality is afterwards infused into the words 

 used in its expression. It follows from this that 

 speech is not only spontaneously and unconsciously 

 personified as the material covering of the idea or 

 emotion enclosed in it, but that the same thing occurs 

 in language as a whole, at first vaguely, but after- 



