John Smyth quotes Daniel Boorstin: > "In this long quest, Western Culture has turned from seeking the end > or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How. Might this > empty meaning from our human experience?" Max Weber who trained a very sharp eye at the evolution of Victorian society theorized that at the core of it lay the Entzauberung, the disenchantment, of the world. The turn was away from the world as an enchanted, a sacred, an ideal place, and instead toward a world as an instrument of the will of the individual. The word "will" of course introduces Schopenhauer who had originally proposed this view. Wagner and Mahler are said to have been deeply affected by Schopenhauer's thinking. Indeed, Charles Taylor writes in his _Sources of the Self_, "In Mahler's Third Symphony we have one of the great expressions in music of Schopenhauer's theory of the will. In the first movement, in particular, we sense the force of will emanating in nature." But neither Schopenhauer, nor Wagner, nor Mahler were about replacing the old enchantment with the hard reality of modern science. Rather they quested for what it was in us, as individuals, that might be encouraged in order to achieve oneness with All. I think it is this that was at the nub of post-Victorian aesthetics. Denis Fodor Internet:[log in to unmask]