Music acts upon our senses, and may be made productive of a kind of
natural delight, for in the same manner as we receive, through the organ
of the eye, a kind of involuntary pleasure, when we look at beautiful
arrangements, or combinations, or proportions, in nature, and the
pleasure may be said to be natural, so the pleasure is neither less, nor
less involuntary, nor less natural, which we receive, through the organ
of the ear, from a combination of sounds flowing in musical progression.
The latter pleasure, as it seems natural, so, under certain limitations,
it seems innocent. The first tendency of music, I mean of instrumental,
is to calm and tranquillize the passions. The ideas, which it excites,
are of the social, benevolent, and pleasant kind. It leads occasionally
to joy, to grief, to tenderness, to sympathy, but never to malevolence,
ingratitude, anger, cruelty, or revenge. For no combination of musical
sounds can be invented, by which the latter passions can be excited in
the mind, without the intervention of the human voice.
But notwithstanding that music may be thus made the means both of
innocent and pleasurable feeling, yet it has been the misfortune of man,
as mother cases, to abuse it, and never probably more than in the
present age.
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