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  ...they are native to the passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.
[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no object in nature.]
There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling for the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular privilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate and express those depths of human nature which can speak no language current in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.   What rescues a part of our passions from this pathological plight, and gives them some other function than merely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually representative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience is pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also rational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a meaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal soul as a dream might fuse them,...   Santayana, George

Excerpt from The Life of Reason · This quote is about emotions · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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