[91] The same statement holds good as regards the "Temptations of Saint Anthony" and other analogous subjects that have often attracted painters.
[92] R. Dubois, Leçons de physiologie générale et comparée, p. 286.
[93] Von Baer, in James, Psychology, I, 639.
[94] Psychology of the Emotions, Part I, Chapter IX.
[95] Arréat, Mémoire et Imagination, p. 118.
[96] Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his Lieder: "Music is more definite than speech, and to want to explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure. I do not think that words suffice for that end, and were I persuaded to the contrary, I would not compose music. There are people who accuse music of being ambiguous, who allege that words are always understood: for me it is just the other way; words seem to me vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, if we compare them to the true music that fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the music that I like expresses to me seems to me too definite, rather than too indefinite, for anyone to be able to match words to it."
[97] Oelzelt-Newin, op. cit., pp. 22-23. For analogous facts from contemporary musicians, see Paulhan, Rev. Phil., 1898, pp. 234-35.
[98] For the sake of brevity and clearness I do not give here the observations and evidence. They will be found at the end of this work, as [Appendix D].
Under the title "An experimental test of musical expressiveness," Gilman, in American Journal of Psychology, vol. IV, No. 4, and vol. V, No. 1 (1892-3), has studied from another point of view the effect of music on various listeners. Eleven selections were given; I note that three or four at the most excited visual images—ten (perhaps eleven), emotional states. More recently, the Psychological Review (September, 1898, pp. 463 ff.) has published a personal observation of Macdougal in which sight-images accompany the hearing of music only exceptionally and under special conditions. The author characterizes himself as a "poor visualizer;" he declares that music arouses in him only very rarely visual representations; "even then they are fragmentary, consisting of simple forms without bond between them, appearing on a dark background, remaining visible for a moment or two, and soon disappearing." But, having gone to the concert fatigued and jaded, he sees nothing during the first number: the visions begin during the andante of the second, and accompany "in profusion" the rendering of the third. (See Appendix D.) May we not assume that the state of fatigue, by lowering the vital tone, which is the basis of the emotional life, likewise diminishes the tendency of affective dispositions to arise again under the form of memory? On the other hand, sensory images remain without opposition and come to the front; at least, unless they are reënforced by a state of semi-morbid excitation.