Now, when one commences thoroughly to reason out life from one’s individual feelings, it becomes necessary to reconstruct philosophy--namely, to construct it ‘from the bottom up,’ from the demands and relations of the individual up to the constitution of the mass. And it is quite natural that when insistence is thus laid on the individual point of view the senses enter into the question far more largely than before. At its most extreme this view comes to an unrestrained license for the senses--a vice typical of Restoration France. But its nobler side was its desire to discover how the other man felt and what his needs were, in place of reasoning on abstract grounds how he ‘ought’ to act. Besides, since the French Revolution people had been experiencing things so incessantly that they had got the habit. After the fall of Napoleon they could not consent to return to a calm observation of events. Rather, it was precisely because external events had calmed down that they so much more needed violent experience in their imaginative and artistic life. The classic tragedies of the French ‘golden age’ were indeed emotional and in high degree, but the emotions were those of types, not of individuals. They were looked on as grand æsthetic spectacles rather than as appeals from one human being to another. It was distinctly bad form to show too much emotion at a tragedy of Racine’s; whereas in the romantic period tears were quite in fashion. However great the human falsity of the romantic dramas, they at least pretended to be expressions of individual emotions, and were received by their audiences as such. The life of a follower of the arts in Paris in the twenties and thirties (or anywhere in Europe, for that matter) was one of laughing and weeping in the joys and sorrows of others, moving from one emotional debauch to another, and taking pride in making the feelings of these creations of art as much as possible one’s own. It was small wonder, then, that musicians did the same; that, in addition to trying to paint pictures and tell stories, they should endeavor to make every stroke of beauty _felt_ by the auditor, and felt in a physical sensuous thrill rather than in a philosophic ‘sense of beauty.’