ABSTRACT
In examining the position taken by Joseph Addison in the numbers of the Pleasures of the Imagination with regard to music's place in the 'modern system of the arts', to use the expression coined by Paul O. Kristeller we noted how his emphasis on the sense of sight and the mimetic principle made it hard to place the art of sounds among the arts grouped around the 'secondary pleasures of the imagination'. In Hutcheson's system, music assumes a special place. While the other arts are discussed in the light of the principle under whose heading comparative beauty belongs, music belongs to the kind of beauty whose pleasantness is connected with the principle of uniformity in variety. As with the term harmony, its extraordinary semantic range includes a special musical significance, linked with the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration. Music in Du Bos becomes that which transforms 'pleasure of the ear into pleasure of the heart'.
