Our scientific definitions of noise and music serve the purpose of science, but the truth is that with nature noise and music are identical in origin. There is orderly noise and disorderly noise, and music is of the orderly kind,—that is all. Discording noise, undiscording noise. Milton understood this, writing of singing With melodious noise, and replying With undiscording voice. I want to emphasize this teaching, want to impress you with the conviction that all the excitement we are seeking in our most modern style of music is but a reversion to our original instinctive desire for a dynamical excitement,—not an excitement merely æsthetical and phychical, but actually moving, forceful, elemental; a true barbaric love of stir and thrill,—and rightly so. If you think, you will find in all our modern ways a tendency to this reversion to a belief in and a culture of our original instincts. The realism of the day is the expression of a desire to understand life as it is to the individual. The hideousness of a merely conglomerate community is making itself felt upon every plane of society, and the concurrent aspiration is to be more human. Culture will one day exhaust the conventional, and in music the tendency is apparent. The vast volume of choral sound we listen to stirs us with contagious emotion. Our pleasure in grand organs with their roll of diapasons and arresting challenge of trumpets and tubas; our willing yielding up of ourselves to be swayed hither and thither for hours in the power of the massive orchestra, that wonderful machine of nerves and muscles,—what does it mean? It is all dynamical, all barbaric. It is not only the ear that is concerned in listening, the whole being is under strain and stress. Do I hence imply that it is wrong, is reprehensible so to employ music? By no means. The moral of it is that the strong innate tendencies of our nature are best recognized, and used; nay, that they will be, will force themselves to the surface, and that under culture we may train them to our advantage. For civilization must go forward, is not content to-day with that which contented it yesterday. The appetite grows by that it feeds on; more and more we ask for intensity of excitement. A scientific writer of an earlier generation, I think it was Leslie, defined the ear as an organ of touch, which we now under the evolutionary investigation of development understand it to be; and this is what I would have you recognise, that sound is able _to touch us_, able to awaken a net-work of nerve organization, to make the lip tense, to cause the eyelids to quiver and the heart to throb; the breath to come and go in accord with the aërial pulsations,—as a hand that is laid upon us to arrest or to exalt, to invigorate or to soothe. _Hearing_ is an exalted _feeling_.