ABSTRACT
The main theory that Pratt was concerned to present an alternative to was the theory that these are merely moods or feelings which the listener has erroneously transferred from himself to the music because he has become a victim of the pathetic fallacy. Ruskin believed that our emotions can induce a falsity in our experience of the external world.2 Physical objects can assume false appearances under the influence of violent emotion, so that we impute characteristics to such objects that really they lack. We attribute to inanimate objects characteristics that are specific to
living things and we credit to other kinds of living things qualities that only human beings possess. Although we know that non-human creatures lack specifically human characteristics and that inanimate objects are not forms of life, the emotions have the power to make it appear to us otherwise: these objects can then seem to be qualified by properties that they are incapable of possessing. The excited state of our feelings makes us for the time irrational. With our reason temporarily unhinged, we imagine the objects we perceive to have characteristics which we know they cannot have. Ruskin gave the name ‘the pathetic fallacy’ to this falseness in our impressions of external things induced by strong emotion.
