Before we ask ourselves seriously how far this represents our experience of the drama, we must question its fidelity to the thought of Aristotle; and that question seems to have received a final answer in the exhaustive discussion of Bernays.<1> Without going into his arguments, suffice it to say that Aristotle, scientist and physician's son as he was, had in mind in using this striking metaphor of the Katharsis of the emotions, a perfectly definite procedure, familiar in the treatment, by exciting music, of persons overcome by the ecstasy or "enthusiasm" characteristic of certain religious rites. Bernays quotes Milton's preface to "Samson Agonistes:" "Tragedy is said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions; that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion; for so in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours," adding "the homoeopathic comparison shows how near he was to the correct notion." Bernays concludes that by Katharsis is denoted the "alleviating discharge" of the emotions themselves. In other words, pity and fear are bad, and it is a good thing to get rid of them in a harmless way, as it is better to be vaccinated than to have small pox. <1> _Zwei adhandlungen uber d. Aristotelische Theories d. Drama_, 1880. Now this alleviating discharge is pleasurable (meth hedones), and the pleasure seems, from allied passages, to arise not in the accomplished relief from oppression, but in the process itself. This becomes intelligible from the point of view of Aristotle's definition of pleasure as an ecstatic condition of the soul. For every emotion contains, according to Aristotle, be it ever so painful, an ecstatic degree would effect, at the same time with an alleviating discharge, a pleasure also. Pity and fear are aroused to be allayed, and to give pleasure in the arousing and the relief.