The question has seriously been asked, What is a melody in itself. The question has sense when we understand by it, What are those new qualities which appear through a certain combination of sounds? Those qualities are not nothing, they are something quite peculiar. We call one of them rhythm, another one is the fixed succession of notes of a different pitch. The qualities of a melody as a whole are not qualities of its separate parts; yet therefore the melody is not a thing in itself. We might just as well speak of a watch in itself, meaning thereby that peculiar unity of the combination of its parts which makes of them a watch. But if we thus speak of “the watch in itself,” we must be aware that this idea has not somewhere in a transcendental fairy-land an independent existence above space and time, and outside of its parts. The unity of a certain interacting group of parts is, on the one hand, no mere addition of the thinking subject, it is not purely noumenal, it is real and objective; on the other hand it is not a thing in itself, independent of its parts, it is the product of the relations in which its parts affect one another. Is not perhaps the basis of these vagaries a mistaken conception of language? We call a certain sensory picture a tree and we say, the tree has roots, a stem, branches, leaves, and fruits. Autumn sets in and the wind shakes the leaves off the branches. Now we speak of a leafless tree. We cut the tree down and we speak of a rootless tree. We burn the trunk and the branches, and the tree as a phenomenon is gone, all its properties are taken away. What remains? The tree in itself is left, but the tree in itself does not exist. If all the property of a person is taken from him, the person himself is still left. The properties of a tree, however, are not properties in the same sense; they are qualities. If all the qualities and parts of a tree are gone, if only the tree in itself is left—then there is left nothing but the empty word tree, the idea of a tree. II. KANT’S VIEW OF SPACE AND TIME. Let us briefly consider the ground upon which Kant bases his view of the ideality of space and time. Kant asks: “What then are time and space? Are they real existences? Or are they merely relations or determinations of things, such however as would equally belong to these things in themselves, though they should never become objects of intuition; or _are they such as belong only to the form of intuition, and consequently to the subjective constitution of the mind_, without which these predicates of time and space could not be attached to any object?”[43] (Kr. d. r. V. § 2; “Meiklejohn,” p. 23.)