GESTURE AND SPEECH.--Older than speech is the imitation of gestures, which is carried on unconsciously and which, in the general repression of the language of gesture and trained control of the muscles, is still so great that we cannot look at a face moved by emotion without feeling an agitation of our own face (it may be remarked that feigned yawning excites real yawning in any one who sees it). The imitated gesture leads the one who imitates back to the sensation it expressed in the face or body of the one imitated. Thus men learned to understand one another, thus the child still learns to understand the mother. Generally speaking, painful sensations may also have been expressed by gestures, and the pain which caused them (for instance, tearing the hair, beating the breast, forcible distortion and straining of the muscles of the face). On the other hand, gestures of joy were themselves joyful and lent themselves easily to the communication of the understanding; (laughter, as the expression of the feeling when being tickled, serves also for the expression of other pleasurable sensations). As soon as men understood each other by gestures, there could be established a _symbolism_ of gestures; I mean, an understanding could be arrived at respecting the language of accents, so that first _accent_ and gesture (to which it was symbolically added) were produced, and later on the accent alone. In former times there happened very frequently that which now happens in the development of music, especially of dramatic music,--while music, without explanatory dance and pantomime (language of gesture), is at first only empty sound, but by long familiarity with that combination of music and movement the ear becomes schooled into instant interpretation of the figures of sound, and finally attains a height of quick understanding, where it has no longer any need of visible movement and _understands_ the sound-poet without it. It is then called absolute music, that is music in which, without further help, everything is symbolically understood. 217.