Lessee

“ They were altogether free from that vulgar habit of comparing scene with scene which so poisons the eye to all true perception of natural beauty,—as though the one great end were to graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive examination. ”

“ Has any psychologist explored the mind of the sightless and been able to say, "There is no sensation here"?
I tread the solid earth; I breathe the scented air. Out of these two experiences I form numberless associations and correspondences. I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine. I associate the countless varied impressions, experiences, concepts. Out of these materials Fancy, the cunning artisan of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would deny me, because I cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful, [160] lovely face of my thought-child. ”

“ The truth is that we have learned to look at all objects with sophisticated eyes. The schools have wrought that tangle about us, and the tangles within the tangle, until to our bewildered vision nothing appears as it is, but only as hidebound theory presents it. ”

“ To fully understand what takes place when trying to study, let the pupil recall that there are three sources of knowledge.
First: The Senses carry into his mind reports from the outside world—Sensation—sight of the letters, words and sentences, &c. Second: The Intellect operates on these undigested elementary Sense-reports, or Sensations, and find relations among them. This is Perception, or relations among Sensations. Third: The mind acts on the perceived relations and finds relations among them. This is Reason or relations among relations. ”

“ Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments, that when one of his eyes is closed there is a great gap, the so-called 'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, in which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination? ”

“ The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name. There is no nicety of learning sought by the mind, which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. ”

“ The sight, as it is called, of figure, or distance, appearing as it does a simple sensation, is in reality a complex state of consciousness—a sequence in which the antecedent, a sensation of color, and the consequent, a number of ideas, are so closely combined by association that they appear not one idea, but one sensation. ”

“ Now, I have no doubt that, as we grow gradually wiser—and we are doing so every day—we shall discover at last that the eye is a nobler organ than the ear; and that through the eye we must, in reality, obtain, or put into form, nearly all the useful information we are to have about this world. ”

“ We must deny that the lower or natural degree bears any such fixed and permanent relation to the higher, as the eye bears to seeing or the ear to hearing. And considerably more must we deny, if we would be consistent. ”

“ These lures kept the people under the yoke. Thus, mentally unnerved, they found the pastimes pleasant, they were amused by the idle spectacles that were paraded before their eyes, and they were habituated to obedience as fully, but not as usefully to themselves, as little children, who, in order to gladden their eyes with the brilliant pictures of illuminated books insensibly learn to read. ”

“ Transparent as a child, his face is the index of his mood. There—and indeed not only there, but in his whole figure, which unconsciously obeys the trend of his mind—his thoughts are inevitably reflected. ”

“ Besides such obvious or presumable bodily activities requisite for looking and listening as distinguished from mere seeing and hearing, there is moreover in all perception of shape, as in all grasping of meaning, a mental activity involving what are called attention and memory. A primer of aesthetics is no place for expounding any of the various psychological definitions of either of these, let us call them, faculties. ”

“ This exercise of the eye I desire to promote, and, next to moral and religious doctrine, I know no more important practical lessons in this earthly life of ours—which, to the wise man, is a school from the cradle to the grave—than those relating to the employment of the sense of vision in the study of nature. ”

“ I observe a series of visual impressions, and at the same time a series of auditory impressions; if there is a certain agreement between them, I irresistibly unite these two series by my act of attention into one series, and refer them to a common cause. And so in the other cases. Attention seems to defeat, in part, its own object. Bringing something into the field of knowledge seems to be a modifying, if not a transforming, process. ”

“ She frequently visited towns where a popular preacher or lecturer was announced, and made one of the vast throng that passed about him; then, taking a favourable position, rapidly scanned the upturned faces, wondering, meanwhile, what that strange, subtle something is, by which we recognise each other; that unerring consciousness, so that among ten thousand faces, could we view them one by one, we know at a glance that the one we seek is not there; we do not stop, and doubt, and compare—we know. ”

“ At the beginning, when the centers of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, in the brain are still imperfectly developed, each of these perceives for itself, the perceptions in the different departments of sense having as yet no connection at all with one another. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. ”

“ And so the general experience of the senses, as was said, is called The lust of the eyes, because the office of seeing, wherein the eyes hold the prerogative, the other senses by way of similitude take to themselves, when they make search after any knowledge. ”

“ My argument is, that the generic images that arise before the mind's eye, and the general impressions which are faint and faulty editions of them, are the analogues of these composite pictures which we have the advantage of examining at leisure, and whose peculiarities and character we can investigate, and from which we may draw conclusions that shall throw much light on the nature of certain mental processes which are too mobile and evanescent to be directly dealt with. ”

“ Distractions, tempests, and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,—these are they which thwart study and bring it to nought. ”

“ There is in the subject before us a field for observation and description in which the artist and the physician may work together, observing and analyzing, with as much exactness as may be, the mode by which the varying conditions of the brain and mind are indicated to our eye, and may therefore be described by words, and by drawing or sculpture. ”

“ LISA. And shall I wear these beautiful things all the time?
EDITH. To-morrow they will play fairy again; after that, my cousins will go away, and you will have to begin to study. Do you like to study?
LISA. What is study?
EDITH. Do you not even know your alphabet? How funny it will be to see Miss Magin sitting up like a forsaken owl, calling out A, and A you will softly say; then B, and C, and so on. If you had learned to read, you would have to pore over books all the time. Nothing but books! I could learn more, rambling about three days, than I could in books in half a century. ”

“ We have, as a matter of fact, been led to the belief that the meaning of depth is carried, in the last resort, by a brain-habit. But how differently does this sentence read before and after the discussion! You have learned something of the difficulties of the study of perception; you see why it is necessary to look at perception historically, developmentally; you have been taken behind the obvious visual cues to the perception itself; you have seen how the kinæsthetic sensations and the binocular picture may be made the subject of experiment. ”

“ Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at pleasure the impressions of the senses, and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain, or unravelling a tangled clue, such are implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician. ”

“ But a poetical slough of despond may be transfigured in the twinkling of an eye—after a proper amount of study and hard thinking—into an elevated plateau with prospects upon every side, grand or terrible or smiling. ”

“ Recent psychology teaches that, odd as it at first appears, our more or less definite images, auditive as well as visual, and whether actually perceived or merely remembered, are in reality the intermittent part of the mind's contents, coming and going and weaving themselves on to a constant woof of our own activities and feelings. ”

“ How far apart in the young man’s experience were theory and practice was manifested by the hot blush that sprang to his brow, the quick stare in which an acute eye might have read an ingenuous and provincial dismay. ”

“ Its aim is to teach the unscientific observer how to make use of his eye,—'how to look, and what to look at;' and to show him how much of wonder and beauty lies everywhere around him, if he could only recognise it. ”

“ And yet it is evident, from obvious observations, as well as from the whole tenor of these papers, that the eye and ear, with their associations, are the chief sources of intellect; and that the greatest part of the pleasures and pains of human life arise from visible and audible impressions, which in themselves afford neither pleasure nor pain. ”

“ Every sensation—as for example, color—is therefore only the subjective form in which an excitation of our peculiar Being, sustained through the instrumentality of external influence, comes to consciousness in us,
(2) Although no single sensation is a copy of the reality, yet definite relations with one another of the single real ‘Things’ seem to come to our perception in the very forms of combination in which different sensations are brought to us in juxtaposition or succession ”

“ Is not the one the appropriate field and province of observation,—a power habitually awake to all the perceptions and impressions of the bodily organs? and does not the other fall exclusively under the cognizance of reflection,—an operation which inverts all the ordinary habits of the understanding, abstracting the thoughts from every sensible object, and even striving to abstract them from every sensible image? ”

“ Don't sway the body, or nod the head, or shrug the shoulders, or move the feet, or make motions or gestures, unless the proper expression call for it, and your emotion prompts.
The eye.
The eye is particularly effective in expression, as there the [Pg 92] emotion first shows itself; and by it you can get and keep the attention of your audience. In reading, keep your eye off the book as much as possible, and on your audience. In recitation or extempore speaking, look at your audience. The eye leads in gesture, and, in many cases, looks in the direction of the gesture. ”

“ Eye, ear, and tongue are civilized; intellect remains a gross feeder still. Good reading comes last among the arts of taste.
This is not an essay in reform; it is content to be a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine experiences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly mind? ”

“ Who can say where the mouth leaves off and where the smile begins? In order to give a just opinion, both the observer and the object of observation must be in a state of rest. But who can be quiet near a Parisian, and what Parisian woman is ever quiet? ”

“ But if sight and hearing thus have their origin from the brain and not from without, there must have been some predisposing cause, some excitement to induce such a condition of things. “The impressions become abnormal and subjective,—the normal condition being objective,—the impression is received from without, and impressed upon the eye. ”

“ When a word is pronounced in my hearing I hear the sound as a sound, perceive the person in the other room represented vicariously by the voice, and at the same time hear the word as a word and as a symbol of meaning. In general, the description of a sensation is best accomplished in terms of perception. ”

“ In the wanderings of delirium, in the fancies of the mad, the inconsequent prattle of the child, and the babble of the old man, we see the same thing, i.e.--the law according to which ideas course through the mind when they are left to themselves. You talk to a child about glass--you wish to provoke a proper curiousity as to how glass is made, and what are its uses. ”

“ He paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. 'He gives,' as Lessing says, 'a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls ”

“ If we say, ‘sweet,’ ‘blue,’ ‘warm,’ then the entire work performed by thinking consists in designating by the adjective form of the name, as though it were an independent property inhering in another subject, a content which is wholly and merely an experience in the form of immediate sensation, but which can be neither produced nor imparted by the medium of thinking. ”