Instrumental music, considered in itself, with the symphony as its highest expression, has been declared by a learned writer to be the grandest artistic creation, and the ultimate form of art in which the vast cycle of all things human will find its development.  A symphony is an architectural construction of sounds, mobile in form, and not absolutely devoid of a literary meaning.  Yet we must not seek in instrumental music for that which it cannot afford, such as the ideas contained in words.  Any one must admit the futility of the attempt to give a dramatic interpretation or language to instrumental music, who reads the description attempted by Lenz and other writers of some of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Instrumental music does not lend itself to these interpretations, since it is an art with an independent existence.  We have observed that in its first development it was used as an accompaniment to the voice, or associated with the movements of the body, or with the dance, and consequently had not the independence which was gradually achieved, until it culminated in the symphony.  Instrumental music adds nothing to literature, nor to the expression of ideas and sentiments, but in it pure music consists, and it is the very essence of the art.  Literature and poetry belong to a definite order of ideas and emotions; music is only able to afford musical ideas and sentiments.  Instrumental music has its peculiar province as the supreme art which composes its own poems by means of the order, succession, and harmony of sounds; it delights, ravishes, and moves us by exciting the emotional part of our nature, and thus arouses a world of ideas which may be modified at pleasure, and which may, by the powerful means at its disposal, produce effects of which instruments merely used for accompanying the voice are incapable.  When instrumental music was released from all servitude to other arts, as well as from all positive sense of religious emotions or mythical and symbolic prejudice, thought was able to create the art of sounds, which contains in itself a special aim and meaning.

We have thus reached the term of our arduous and fatiguing journey.  We flatter ourselves that a truth has been gleaned from it, and this conviction is not, due to a presumptuous reliance on our powers, but on the conscientious honesty of our researches, combined with a great yet humble love of truth.  Others, who are better endowed with genius and learning will judge of our success, and we shall willingly submit to their criticism and correction, so long as they are fair and unprejudiced and only aim at the truth.  From animal perception, and the mental and physical fact into which it is to be resolved, we have traced the root which in man’s case grows into a mighty tree; the first germ of all the mythical ideas of every people upon earth.  The subjectivity of which animals and man are spontaneously conscious in every internal and external phenomenon, the subsequent entification of ideas, even after thought has attained