 Effectively, the imitation that Rousseau considers central to music is the arousal of an emotion that is specific enough to be associated with a given object. Thus, while Rousseau is not skeptical with regard to music’s capacity to imitate worldly objects, he is able to defend this view because he redefines imitation in terms of emotional arousal. In this sense, he is still representative of a progressive shift away from a view of music as imitation.