Music, as a term, suffers much from diffusiveness. When we reflect that, in one sense or another, it denominates anything between the idle notes of the plough boy and the finished performance of an opera singer, between the productions of a Jew's harp and of a cathedral organ, between the playing of two or three foreign tramps and of a Philharmonic Orchestra; when we reflect that man's attitude to music is at one time active and at another passive, and when we also reflect that the acceptance of sound as music by man is largely dependent on his individual views and tastes, we must see how impossible it is to invent a definition of music that will serve as a universal standard, to which we can refer psychological observations without lengthy qualifications and limitations. I put forward this self-evident proposition in order to show how easily we may fall into error in particular considerations, if the term is used generally and without specialisation.