The Essential Nature of Music
Herbert Antcliffe · 2025
When we come to a serious study of the position taken by music in the polity of human life, there are two points which are most obvious. The first of these is that the art, in its elemental forms chiefly, but also in a less degree in those more highly developed, has had a widespread and an effective influence on nearly all departments of human life. Secondly, that that influence is the most unaccountable and erratic of all the influences to which human life is subject. It is an influence of which no science has yet given any adequate explanation, and least of all those sciences which are most applicable to the subject, the sciences of psychology and sociology.