This paper investigates an unpublished manuscript on music by William Stanley Jevons. In the first section we analyze the origin of the manuscript, and show that it should be seen as a part of Jevons's utilitarian 'science of man' project. The manuscript serves also as a justification for the time Jevons devotes to playing music, and it was meant as an improvement of already existing literature on the subject. In the second section we summarize the chapter 'On the Functions of Music', and we highlight several aspects.
Music is partly an object of enjoyment, but it fulfills educational and moralizing purposes as well.
An 'intellectual cleavage' in Jevons's ideas on music appears, when he argues that everyone may enjoy lower forms of music, but that higher forms require education and training. His diagrams on the classification of the arts reflect this 'cleavage'. In the third section we investigate the aesthetic context of Jevons's manuscript, and we argue that it belongs to the Anglo-Saxon aesthetic tradition of Shaftesbury. This becomes clear in the fourth section, in which we investigate Jevons's policy prescriptions regarding public performances of music. These cheap and easily accessible means of spreading culture may operate as tools to elevate moral consciousness among the people.