ABSTRACT
Among the answers which recognise the existence of a specific, a sui generis musical emotion, there is one I have purposely kept separate and held back. It is from a professor of natural science, accustomed, perhaps, to find things in general rather less simple than the rest of us. For to his emphatic “yes” he has added the following rider. “It” (i.e. the specific “Emotion of Music”) “conceivably only appears to be suck owing to complications.” I wish he had explained what he meant by that saying; and it is useless asking, for even if he is alive, he has no doubt forgotten during the twenty years which have intervened since he wrote those suggestive and cryptic words. But since, whatever may have been behind them in his mind, those words happen to sum up a meaning to which I myself, though in a very special sense, am much inclined, I will adopt them at their face value, merely as a formula for taking our enquiry a little further. And I will interpret and illustrate their possible meaning, or rather set some of my Answerers to interpreting and illustrating, without their being aware of so doing,
