I promised not to be historical; but I may mention it here as an extraordinary piece of insight on Aristotle’s part, in which, essentially, he followed and summarised Plato, when he said that music was of all the arts the most imitative, meaning expressive, precisely on the ground that of all the arts it was the least representative. Its expression, that is to say, approached most nearly to what we have ventured to call a priori expressiveness. Its rhythms and combinations went directly to the heart of emotion. They are, Aristotle says, direct resemblances of emotions, that is, without making the circuit of reference to anything which had a name and existence in the external world. I suppose this is in general the doctrine of musical expression accepted to-day.
In speaking of the place of representation in aesthetic experience, we have said all that is important on the aesthetic position of the love of natural beauty. For nature in its utmost range, including artificial things, and man as an external
