102/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

The awakened genius for discovery and invention soon placed the new-born art upon a practical foundation, by devising instruments suited to its more advanced requirements. Simultaneously with the growth of the ideal philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel, the religious awakening of the Lutheran reformation, and the marvelous achievements of the Italian Renaissance, the new art of Music found expression in the works of Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

So mightily was the modern world stirred by the desire to become better acquainted with the essential nature of things, that the impetus was felt in all those worlds of expression.
Sculpture achieved its greatest triumphs in ancient Greece, Painting in Italy, and Music in Germany.

It was in the fourteenth century that Music began to make a radical advance beyond the simple forms in which it had been preserved, during the dark ages, mainly through the agency of the church. It then began to assume new importance, as a direct result of attempts to place it upon a substantial scientific foundation.

From that period its growth was rapid and sure. As an art, it rests on a valid basis, both from a psychological and a physiological point of view. Psychologically, it appeals to the higher human faculties, by reason of its power to embody ideas and convey them to the hearer through emotional channels.

Physiologically, it reaches the brain through the auditory nerves, causing sympathetic vibrations in the bodily organism. These operations conform to unvarying natural laws; and the discovery, in modern times, of those laws has established the art on a secure and permanent foundation.

The phenomena of sound previously associated with the world of Nature afford no expression in any way comparable to musical art. A sensitive ear is capable of detecting harmonics in some waterfalls; but such suggestions were too faint and indefinite to call forth a response from human ingenuity; in fact, they first became definitely distinguishable by the aid of modern physics.

In the light of present knowledge, the songs of birds are seen to have been prophetic of the development of vocal music; but even that expression was lacking in the higher animals. Vocal music was probably evolved by slow degrees from forms of speech, being, primitively, scarcely more than inflections or modulations of the talking voice.

To it was added, in time, accompaniments upon such rudely constructed instruments as were then in use. The development of instrumental music within the last few centuries has surpassed, in originality, all previous achievements in any field of art.