Between the two movements there was little direct contact.
From Alison in 1790 to Mill, Spencer, and Bain in the middle
of the nineteenth century, British psychological philosophy
maintains its course, attributing æsthetic effect mainly to
association, and advancing the real problem, viz. what is
accidental in association and what is not, little beyond the
point at which Burke had left it. True English æsthetic has
not sprung from philosophy or philosophers, except through
the negative contact of Mr. Ruskin with Alison and Burke.
Only Herbert Spencer, as has been noticed above, ¹ made a
real contribution to the ideas of spontaneity and economy in
the beautiful, in the latter case certainly anticipating Fechner,
and independently confirming the results of the brothers
Weber. ² On the other hand Spencer's theory of the vocal
origin of music is not even directed to a serious problem.
Granting for the sake of argument that musical beauty was
first apprehended through the voice, we gain from this no sort
of explanation as to the conditions which underlie the musical
expressiveness of the voice itself. The fragmentary and
partial, although prior in time, must be explained by the
systematic, and not the systematic by the partial. In so far
as voice-modulation has musical expressiveness, its beauty de-
pends upon musical relations, which in a vastly wider range
of effect than that of vocal cadences are the matter to be
explained.

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