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accessibles a I'art musical. Celui-ci ne peut exprimer le contenu des sentiments mais seulement leur cote dynamique, c'est-a-dire, des variations de force et de mouvement."^^ In origin^ ^ and in its grandest modern compositions music is a social product, not in the sense that the musician consciously composes for society and what society will approve, but in the sense that he is thrown into the creative state through direct or indirect social influence. If direct, it may be the influence of a friend or some other ex- ternal influence of which he is less conscious; or it may be indirect in the sense of a purely subjective influence. Thus a friend of mine is fond of the quotation: "Life is all song when one lives in harmony with the Infinite." Our isolated farmer, while working, talks with the Lord and sings hymns. A com- poser once told me that when she sat down at the organ to play she sometimes thought for a moment of "the Ideal" and then went ahead. She was apt to have this thought at a concert when it helped her to forget the audience and the occasion and to lose herself in her playing.
The "wider contacts and fresh experiences"^^ acquired through social intercourse, general reading, and music broaden the leading ideas and stimulate the fertility of the attentive process.^* The degree of this development depends, of course, on the capacity of the individual. ^^ It depends also on the tem- perament of the individual and on the disposition which is built
" Ribot, La Idgique des sentiments, p. 157.
^ Ibid., 153; Wallaschek, Primitive Music.
" Ross, Social Psychology, p. 270.
^*"The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and imple- ments, the mechanic generalizes his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road. "Only in so far as a man understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he any effective existence. There is nothing more practical than social imagina- tion; to lack it is to lack everything." — Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, pp. 107-17.
"An imaginative student of a few people and of books often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied career can give to a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare, may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by miracle but by a mar- velous vigor and refinement of imagination." — Cooley, op. cit., p. 106.
