belief by irresistible processes of logic; the scientist's axiom is
that if the premises be true the conclusion _must_ follow, and he
pours scorn upon all who refuse assent to his interpretations,
denouncing them as ignorant, superstitious, if not wilfully blind and
perverse. Mystery, according to the ancients the beginning of
philosophy, has no place in science; what cannot be explained is
superstitious and must be rejected as false. The source of art, as of
religion, must be sought not in the ineffable, incomprehensible
phenomena of nature, but in the human mind, in reason, to which all
art must conform.

This was the spirit in which the founders of the _nuove musiche_
sought to carry out their reforms; their intolerance rivals that of
Lucretius or Haeckel. It is impossible to suppose that men of their
highly-cultured aesthetic sense were deaf to the purely musical beauty
of polyphony. They were trained in its school, and had employed it
themselves most skilfully in their madrigals. It was the _mystery_ of
the mass and of its attendant music which they detested.

Another consideration must be added. Hand in hand with this
rationalizing tendency, indeed only another phase of the same
phenomenon, is the striving for self-assertion of the individual,
which is the mark of all progress towards higher civilization. The
contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church,
where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The
_nuove musiche_ sought to emancipate the individual, and allow
him to express his own independent existence. Thus the progress of the
modern musical drama presents an exact parallel to that of the Greek
drama, from before Thespis onwards, except that here the change from
lyric to dramatic representation was slower, because, there being no