What we call a symphony is merely a series of ordered sounds produced by means of instruments of various kinds. It is sound and nothing else. Our programme books tell us about “first themes” and “second themes,” and we make what effort we can to patch together the various brilliant textures of symphonic music into a coherent pattern, but the music we seek lies behind these outward manifestations as, in a lesser sense, the significance of a great poem lies behind the actual words. So it is with all the greatest art, whatever the medium may be. The chief difference between a symphony and any other form of artistic expression--such as a novel, a play, a painting, or a piece of sculpture--is that a symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; it is itself only. And it is this quality or property of being itself that gives to all pure music its remarkable power. Any intelligent person, on being shown a diagram or plan of a symphonic movement, could be made to understand how and why the material was so disposed, for that disposition is dictated to the composer by the nature of sound and by the limitations and capacities of human beings, and it conforms to certain principles which operate everywhere; but that understanding would not reveal the symphony to him. There is in every one of us a region of sensibility in which mind and emotion are blended and from which the imagination acts, and it is to this sensibility that music appeals. Now, the imagination, which we believe to be the highest function of human beings, cannot act from the mind alone. Mathematics, for example, does not lie entirely in the domain of the mind, and the same thing may be said of any other department of science. The chief value of scientific studies in school and university lies in the stimulation of the student’s imagination rather than in the acquisition of scientific facts. Now, we cannot conceive any act of the imagination whatever that does not glow with the radiance of emotion, so that music, in appealing to the whole being, is not so completely isolated as is generally supposed. But the simultaneous appeal of music to the mind and the feelings has led to much confusion on the part of writers who have not been sensitive to all its qualities. In his essay on “Education” Herbert Spencer, for example, in discussing the union of science and poetry, says: “It is doubtless true that, as states of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend to exclude each other. And it is doubtless true also that an extreme activity of the feelings tends to deaden the reflective powers: in which sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antagonistic to each other.” Now this statement reveals at once the limitations of a philosophic mind when dealing with something that requires apprehension by the feelings also. In listening to music the reflective powers are not engaged with objects or with definite ideas, but with pure sound