Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/253

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No. 2.]
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
239

cessions are employed to effect the transition to another tone: cf. association by partial identity. Here two things are necessary: the fading of the memory of the first tone; the self-insistence of the second. (2) Where the two tones are widely distant from one another, intermediate chords are employed. The mental phenomena of modulation are the same as before. (Example from Lohengrin.) (3) Similar, again, is the mechanism of enharmonic modulation (Lohengrin).

An analogous theory could be applied to cadences (Lohengrin) and to dissonant chords. In both cases our musical sense follows the laws of systematic association and inhibition; the hearing of certain chords leads irresistibly to the expectation of certain others, and dissonances must be resolved upon a consonant chord. The final question, the 'why' of harmony, still remains; its physiological causes are not yet definitively known.

Music appears thus as living, organic; "une sorte d'esprit ideal que nous substituons au nôtre." In the musical drama, music is concretised to express the facts of real life, these facts being in their turn idealized by it. The application is a legitimate one.

E. B. T.

ETHICAL.


Die sittliche Frage eine sociale Frage. F. Staudinger. Phil. Mon., XXIX, 1, pp. 30-53.

Philosophy, like all science, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its immediate aim of widening and deepening knowledge must subordinate itself to the universal aim of the harmonious perfection of man. A philosophy which neglects this practical, ideal aim becomes a mere affair of the schools. At the present time the divergence between the scientific and popular thought seems to be giving place again more and more to an approximation. On the one hand, the consciousness of the people is freeing itself from the stupid, uncritical acceptance of the dogmatic philosophy of the church, while on the other hand scientific philosophy is basing itself on the natural sciences and becoming more and more practical. On the theoretical side it is, to be sure, the materialistic philosophy which exercises a great influence on our contemporaries among both the laboring classes and the so-called higher classes. Nor, indeed, should the philosopher regret this, however one-sided and inadequate he may regard materialism. For the materialistic mode of thought