In accordance with the principle that complete explanation of
psychical facts is possible only through the physiological
substrate, we have so far kept rather to that field in dealing
with the foundations of our pleasure in rhythm. But further
description of the rhythmical experience is most natural in
psychological terms. There seems, indeed, on principle no
ground for the current antithesis, so much emphasized of late,
of "psychical" and "motor" theories of rhythm. Attention and
expectation are not "psychical" as opposed to "motor." Granting,
as no doubt most psychologists would grant, that attention is
the psychical analogue of the physiological tendency to motor
discharge, then a motor automatism of which one is fully
conscious could be described as expectation and its satisfaction.
Indeed, the impossibility of a sharp distinction between ideas
of movement and movement sensations confirms this view. When
expectation has reference to an experience with a movement
element in it, the expectation itself contains movement
sensations of the kind in question.<1> To say, then, that
rhythm is expectation based on the natural functioning of the
attention period, is simply to clothe our physiological
explanation in terms of psychological description. The usual
motor theory is merely one which neglects the primary disposition
to rhythm through attention variations, in favor of the
sensations of muscular tension (kinaesthetic sensations) which
arise IN rhythm, but do not cause it. To say that the impression
of rhythm arises only in kinaesthetic sensations begs the
question in the way previously noted. Undoubtedly, the period
once established, the rhythmic group is held together, felt as
a unit, by means of the coordinated movement sensations; but
the main problem, the possibility of this first establishment,
is not solved by such a motor theory. In other words, the
attention theory is the real motor theory.
<1> C.M. Hitchcock, "The Psychol. Of Expectation," _Psychol.
Rev., Mon. Suppl._, No. 20.
Expectation is the "set" of the attention. Automatism is the
set of the motor centres. Now as attention is parallel to the
condition of the motor centres, we are able to equate expectation
and automatic movement. Rhythm is literally embodied expectation,
fulfilled. It is therefore easily to be understood that whatever
other emotions connect themselves with satisfied expectation are
at their ideal poignance in the case of rhythm.
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