The third and highest value of music is its æsthetic value, or beauty. This value, which springs from the delight we take in perceiving, or mentally organizing our sensations and ideas, is precisely analogous to the æsthetic value of the other arts, as, for example, the beauty of sonnets and other highly articulated poetic forms, of well-composed pictures, of finely-proportioned sculpture, of symmetrical and harmonious architecture. It depends, in general, on the perception of unity in a mass of various impressions, and is but one example of a type of satisfaction we are capable of finding in all the departments of our experience. Wherever, confronted by many objects, sensations, thoughts, or feelings, we are able to gain a sense of their coherence, inter-relation, and essential oneness, we get the characteristic æsthetic value. To win it is the highest success we know. To perceive unity in the bewildering complexity of our experience, is to possess, in the realm of knowledge, truth; in the realm of practice, character; in the realm of art, beauty. Moreover, since perception is a far more active, self-directed process than either sensation or emotion, which are in large degree passively suffered, its contribution to our mental life has for us a deeper charm, a more far-reaching significance, than that of any other faculty. Beauty transfigures all elements that may coexist with it in the mind. In the intellectual sphere, for example, we understand far more deeply the phenomenon when we know its species and genus, and “science is but classified knowledge.” In practical life, all the little every-day events, the petty pleasures and pains, take on, when we view them in relation to a conceived unity in our characters and destinies, a new significance. Similarly in music, values of the first two species, sweetness of sound and emotional expressiveness, can be transfigured by formal beauty; there is no tone that is not sweeter when it embodies a lovely melody; there is no emotion that is not apotheosized by association with others in a harmonious whole, or that does not defeat itself when it stands out single, and will not merge itself in the organism. No music is wholly devoid of any one of the three values; but the greatest music uses the first two only as the materials of the third.