As evidence of the irresistibility with which a rhythmical expression may rouse an audience to an almost unvoluntary imitation, one may refer to the familiar effects of the southern dances. The tarantella, as is well known, often entices the unwilling as well as the willing to join in its wild movements. And the same is said of several other Spanish and Italian dances. We need only refer to the apologue of the Fandango, so often used as a motive of ballets, in which the dance, brought into court for causing disturbance, compels judge and jury to yield to its temptations and dissolve the sitting for a fierce gambade.[128] Such stories give an exaggerated yet typical example of the great influence which the sight of dancing exercises on the lively Latin nations. An impassive Northerner can indeed always master the impulse to join actively in a wild dance. But even he cannot avoid sharing the excitement by internal imitation. It is, however, impossible to decide with any exactitude whether the effects which a dance-performance exercises on the spectators are mainly due to the movements themselves or to the rhythm by which they are regulated. In order, therefore, to estimate at its proper value the importance of time, it is necessary to examine it as it appears when isolated from bodily movement. The lowest types of music, in which the element of melody is of no importance, show us rhythm in its simplest and purest form. Such instruments as drums, tom-toms, and castanets may serve as a most effective means of emotional excitation. The same exaltation or depression, which in a dance is conveyed by a series of varied expressive movements, may be transmitted with almost equal effectiveness by a simple sequence of sounds. Any group of acoustic impressions following each other in a fixed rhythm may, independently of their character, arouse in the listener the same modifications of functions and activities, and hence also the same emotional state, as was originally expressed by this particular time-sequence. Thus pure feeling, as it appears when abstraction has been made of all intellectual elements, can be as it were exteriorised in rhythmical form. And, which is of still greater importance, a pure feeling can in this exteriorisation be fixed down for future repetition. Even in its simplest manifestations art is thus capable of raising an emotional state beyond the limitations of space and time.