Just as life uses death--as when we eat meat and transform it into living tissue--so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in _sound_. Has sound in itself any meaning? I mean by this is there a quality, virtue, life--call it what you will--specifically in sounds and the combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere--in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in mathematics? I think there is; but to go further into this would be to transgress the limits I have set for myself, for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem of philosophy. I shall be content to throw a little light upon it by analogy. Experience in _sound_ has an individuality which separates it from experience in the other arts. This individuality in the arts is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life (the different and analysable virtues of an elephant, a butterfly, a lily and a violet) and to personality in human life. It is an implicit and unexplained factor in all that I shall have to say; but we have to remember that it is the combining, the making of a harmony of this character or idiosyncrasy with the composer’s imagination of love which makes music. It is then that musical _form_ is created. What we call musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious and as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of musical genius. But it is only when great musical genius is combined with great human personality that we get what we may call the great artist as distinct from the merely great musician. CHAPTER III THE GENERAL IDEA OF PROGRESS It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the imagination of love _in sound_ and in Chapter II that music is also the experience of life-and-death _in sound_ are two conclusions not only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will be seen that they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature of music must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of Sullivan, Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and new, peasant and urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. There is no difficulty in this.