It is not likely that anyone will take Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music seriously; and even those who are sympathetic to his general view are not likely to find their sense of the ludicrous undisturbed by his identification of bass notes with the planets, tenor notes with the vegetable world, and so on. The intensity of his response to music and his humourless courage have led him to what are perhaps the most fantastic statements in all his writings. But what is worth noting is that so imaginative and fertile a speculator, because he was genuinely sensitive to music, had to give it a profoundly isolated position in his æsthetic. In so doing we think he recognised one very important difference between music and the other arts. It is true that music is independent of the world of experience in a way that other arts are not. It is true that there is a sense in which Schopenhauer is right when he says that music would exist even if the world did not. We can see what is meant if we compare the development of a “dramatic” piece of music, such as the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony, with a great tragedy. The tragedy, as a condition of success, must make reference to our experience of life. The ostensible matter of the tragedy, the characters and incidents, must not violate our conception of reality if they are to be accepted. The tragedy must be plausible. Such considerations obviously do not apply to music. It is meaningless to say that the development of a composition must satisfy our sense of probability. Yet there is a meaning in saying that its development seems either arbitrary or inevitable. The analogy that immediately presents itself is a chain of logical reasoning, as in the sustained development of a mathematical theorem. Such development is independent of all experience; the mind is obeying none but its own laws, and is paying no attention to any alien elements. And it is this characteristic of mathematics which seems responsible for the fascination the study possesses for its devotees. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world,