If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition beg the question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination of love _in sound_. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love. There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable _in sound_. I say it is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present, and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression. And that may happen. There may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.” And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a closed world. Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow in music but you can sound forth the _shadow_ of that shadow, turn the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform those tremulous visual waves into auditory waves--not in the laboratory of the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may do this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of verse--make a unique sensible impression upon the mind. Debussy’s _Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ makes this impression of a vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds, the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not be expressed in music.