On the influence of education and training in preventing diseases of the nervous system / by Robert Brudenell Carter.

  • Carter, Robert Brudenell, 1828-1918.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the influence of education and training in preventing diseases of the nervous system / by Robert Brudenell Carter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    unless with, reasonable hope of great proficiency, the time often devoted to practising should be much curtailed. Indeed, when it is considered how few of the many girls who learn music avail themselves of their knowledge in after life, this time deserves very serious consideration: and parents should think, not only of what is, but of what might be, accomplished within its limits. I have heard it maintained, by many persons, that music is a natural language, calculated to excite definite ideas; and always actually producing them, in the minds of cultivated persons. For this opinion there is no better authority, that I am aware of, than the poetical license taken by Dryden, in ' Alexander's Feast;' a license which will admit of another, and a more sufficient, explanation. To conceive that any sensation (not produced by some simple quality of matter) shall at once certainly excite a particular idea, is opposed to all that we know of the operations of the mind; and cannot be maintained as an abstract pro- position. Much less can it be maintained with respect to a musical sound: a sensation that many people are unable to distinguish from other sounds bearing some resemblance to it; but having, upon the language hypothesis, other proper ideas attached to them. In short, the ideas which we connect with music, like those which we connect with words, have no firmer link to the sound than +-bat which is furnished by association and practice; and, just as a French child associates an idea of high temperature with the word chaleur, and an English child the same idea with the word heat, so people differently circumstanced will