music-thinking. What relation is there between the music in the mind
and the tones produced by the piano? It seems really as if the piano
were a photographic camera, making for us a picture of what we have
written,--a camera so subtle indeed, that it pictures not things we
can see and touch, but invisible things which exist only within us.
But faithful as the piano is in this, it may become the means of doing
us much injury. We may get into the habit of trusting the piano to
think for us, of making it do so, in fact. Instead of looking
carefully through the pages of our new music, reading and
understanding it with the mind, we run to the piano and with such
playing-skill as we have we sit down and use our hands instead of our
minds. Now a great many do that, young and old. But the only people
who have a chance to conceive their music rightly are the young; the
old, if they have not already learned to do it, never can. That is a
law which cannot be changed.

We have talked about listening so much that it should now be a settled
habit in us. If it is we are learning every day a little about tones,
their qualities and character. And we do this not alone by hearing the
tones, but by giving great heed to them. Let us now remember this:
listening is not of the ears but of the thoughts. It is thought
_concentrated_ upon hearing. The more this habit of tone-listening
goes on in us, the more power we shall get out of our ability to read
music. All these things help one another. We shall soon begin to
discover that we not only have thoughts about sounding-tones, but
about printed tones. This comes more as our knowledge of the scale
increases.

We can now learn one of the greatest and one of the most wonderful
truths of science: _Great knowledge of anything comes from never