In respect to the artificial proportions of sound excited by musical
instruments, those, who have early in life associated them with agreeable
ideas, and have nicely attended to distinguish them from each other, are
said to have a good ear, in that country where such proportions are in
fashion: and not from any superior perfection in the organ of hearing, or
any intuitive sympathy between certain sounds and passions.

I have observed a child to be exquisitely delighted with music, and who
could with great facility learn to sing any tune that he heard distinctly,
and yet whole organ of hearing was so imperfect, that it was necessary to
speak louder to him in common conversation than to others.

Our music, like our architecture, seems to have no foundation in nature,
they are both arts purely of human creation, as they imitate nothing. And
the professors of them have only classed those circumstances, that are most
agreeable to the accidental taste of their age, or country; and have called
it Proportion. But this proportion must always fluctuate, as it rests on
the caprices, that are introduced into our minds by our various modes of
education. And these fluctuations of taste must become more frequent in the
present age, where mankind have enfranchised themselves from the blind
obedience to the rules of antiquity in perhaps every science, but that of
architecture. See Sect. XII. 7. 3.

XI. There are many articles of knowledge, which the animals in cultivated
countries seem to learn very early in their lives, either from each other,
or from experience, or observation: one of the most general of these is to
avoid mankind. There is so great a resemblance in the natural language of
the passions of all animals, that we generally know, when they are in a
pacific, or in a malevolent humour, they have the same knowledge of us; and
hence we can scold them from us by some tones and gestures, and could