I most apologise for the misleading appearance of my synopsis, but a line of argument such as I propose to follow always looks more complicated and disjointed in a synopsis than it really is. The real argument may prove to be a series of logical steps so gradual and so obvious as to seem a pile of platitudes, while the synopsis, which can only give the chief points, and those only in the shortest possible phrases, may seem to be a bundle of paradoxes. The most popular work on a philosophical subject looks ten times as technical and crude in the synopsis than it is in the text; and I fear that I shall seem to have come before you under false pretences, having promised something very abstruse and new, whereas I have only a few very obvious ways of putting together the plainest general truths about music, and have nothing more to say except to emphasise these particular and very familiar ways of putting them together.