Visual perspective

“ To a large extent we are misled by the impressive prominence of the visual data. In vision we are presented with a system of inter-related and simultaneously occurring sensations which we find by experience to be the sure and certain indicators of the potent obstructions which our activity encounters. For this reason we habitually make use of the visual sign as the guide and instrument of our exertional activity, and this habitual use leads us to regard the visual presentation as the essential form of Reality. ”

“ The bloom on a cheek, the warmth of a youthful body, the sweetness and freshness of a fruit, the edge of a sharp knife, are not these, too, impressions obtainable from a picture? Are they visual? What would a picture mean to an imaginary man, lacking all or many of his senses, who should in an instant acquire the organ of sight alone? ”

“ The sense of sight has been wonderfully endowed with a duplicate power which we have come to call the mind's eye. With this visual faculty we produce some very important mental operations. We must first become conscious of this faculty and learn to use it intelligently and then to broaden its scope and increase its power to deal with details.
Visualization is the mind's eye reproduction of an impression made by the sense of sight. ”

“ Thus it is that the eye, without any conscious effort of the observer, is directed in succession to the various points of an object, and it is only by an effort of will in fixing the eyes upon one spot that one becomes aware of the blurred and confused forms of all the rest of the visual picture. ”

“ They are, for instance, the visible forms, colours, and shades of the parts, understood according to the maxims of perspective; (for of perspective every one has a practical knowledge, as every one has of grammar;) the effort by which we fix both our eyes on the same object, and adjust each eye to distinct vision ”

“ We will return, for the sake of simplicity, to the sense of sight, which we chose as our example.The result of positing sensations and then constructing perception with them. Psychology has accustomed us to assume the elementary sensations corresponding to the impressions received by the rods and cones of the retina. With these sensations it goes on to reconstitute visual perception. ”

“ If the light, reflected from a single object touched by us, had produced not two merely, but two thousand separate images in our eyes, erect or inverted, or in any intermediate degree of inclination, the visual feeling, thus excited, however complex, would still have accompanied the touch of a single object ”

“ The sense, then, of the position of any point consists in the tensions in the eye, that not only tends to bring that point to the centre of vision, but feels the suggestion of all the other points which are related to the given one in the web of visual experience. ”

“ It will help you to become conscious of these mind's eye pictures if you will look away from the stranger's face for a moment and see both the face and name pictures in the visual impression which you have been forming. ”

“ All those operations, therefore, which proceed from direct irritation of the nervous part of the visual organ, without the medium of the eye and of light, under the term subjective vision, are opposed to those phenomena produced by the media of eye and light, and known as objective vision. ”

“ So, on the authority of repeated experience, whatever is unsuitable is gradually excluded, and only those eye movements are retained which further the proper convergence of the two retinal images.”104 Of course, the power of vision is by no means completely developed at five months, though the technique of the function, so to speak, is by that time essentially perfected. Now begin the real tasks of visual practice: acquiring familiarity with external objects, imprinting the visual images on the mind, and widening the scope of association. ”

“ A great part of the contents of our minds consists of sensuous (chiefly visual) images, and though we may imagine reflection to go on without further images supplied by vision or hearing, touch or taste or smell, yet we cannot well see how fresh experiences could be gained in such a state. ”

“ Not speech abstractions, the highest conquest of the mind, but the development of the visual conceptions, which are its earliest spontaneous achievement, should be the first object of systematic training. Forms and colors are the elements of all visual impressions ”

“ Sight converses with its objects at a greater distance than does any other sense, and it furnishes our minds with a greater variety of ideas. Indeed, our mental imagery is most largely made up of reminiscences of visual impressions; for when the idea of anything is brought up in our minds by a word, for example, there arises, in most cases, a more or less vivid presentation of some visible appearance. ”

“ Light comes into those open windows, the moving panorama of external nature passes before them, but distinct vision, which recognizes and individualizes objects, is something more than a mere passive, bodily sensation. ”

“ A prolonged and steady looking at an object or at objects near the eye, though at proper distance, without rest or frequent change of the visual focus, as in long and absorbed novel-reading, intense study, or persistent diligence in needlework.
4. The practice of reading or otherwise using the sight at too short range. This results in part from insufficient light; or from its faulty direction, so that the hand or body throws a shadow on the page; or so that the direct rays fall upon the eye, causing undue contraction of the pupil, while the page is in shadow. ”

“ As a matter of fact, we are constantly looking in different directions, and, as a rule, only noticing what, at the moment, is in the centre of our field of vision. Thus our visual world consists rather of a synthesis of things viewed directly in succession than of things seen simultaneously while the centre of the field is kept fixed. ”

“ I am forced to think that the visual field in particular is a thoroughly vicious metaphor when employed to body forth the distinction of focus and margin. Whatever this distinction may in the end turn out to be, it is not such as this comparison would lead one to suppose. Objects seen in indirect vision appear obscure and blurred precisely because they are in the focus of consciousness. ”

“ When the eyes are caught by something in a picture, they do not at first rest there, but proceed, as we have said, on a tour of inspection of the whole area within the frame of that picture, after which they return again to the first visual interest. In making this tour the eyes seek, or at least, follow a pattern. ”

“ Visual Perceptions.—"Seeing" is very largely the mental interpretation of the primary sensations and the conditions under which they occur. For example, our ability to see objects in their natural positions when their images are inverted on the retina is explained by the fact that we are not conscious of the retinal image, but of the mind's interpretation of it through experience. Experience has also taught us to locate objects in the direction toward which it is necessary to turn the eyes in order to see them. ”

“ They say that it is just "highly probable" that the visual perceptions of two individuals have practically the same content when they look at the same object and are both in possession of sound eyes and optical nerves and brain centres. ”

“ Wherever I move, whether by rays or waves of light, from the farthest star to the nearest leaf with its complexity of vein and tint, there comes to that pinpoint of space, the eye, a multitudinous vision. ”

“ It is as in those devices of perspective, where certain beautiful designs look like mere confusion until one restores them to the right angle of vision or one views them by means of a certain glass or mirror. ”

“ Visual Imagery When we speak of “images” in connection with Imagination and Recognition we do not refer merely to mental pictures of things seen. Mental images are representations of past mental experiences of any and every kind. They include past sensations of sound, taste, smell, feeling, pain, motion and the other senses, as well as sensations of sight. One may have a mental image of the voice of a friend, of the perfume of a flower, just as he may have mental images of their [Pg 10] appearance to the eye. ”

“ This is the interesting side of visual perception, that, owing to the vast complex of distinguishable sensations of light and colour of various qualities and intensities, together with the muscular sensations attending the varying positions of the organ, the eye is able to recognize at any instant a whole external world with its fundamental properties and relations. ”

“ That many images of objects rove In many modes to every region round— So thin that easily the one with other, When once they meet, uniteth in mid-air, Like gossamer or gold-leaf. For, indeed, Far thinner are they in their fabric than Those images which take a hold on eyes And smite the vision, since through body's pores They penetrate, and inwardly stir up The subtle nature of mind and smite the sense. ”

“ This admission relieves the theory from the necessity of maintaining, that conceptions derived from touch are transmuted into the perceptions of sight. It attributes to the sight all that ever truly belongs to it, namely, the perception of colours out of one another; it provides the visual intuitions with an externality of their own—and the theory never demands that they should acquire any other ”

“ Whereas we maintain that the only eye that we have—the only eye we can form any conception of—is the visible eye that belongs to the visible body, as a part does to a whole; whether this eye be originally revealed to us by the touch, by the sight, by the reason, or by the imagination. ”

“ Not less powerful is his visual sense, the quick, direct discrimination of his eye, which explains the singularly vivid concision of his descriptions. These are never prolonged nor analytic, have nothing of enumeration, of the quality of the observer, who counts the items to be sure he has made up the sum. ”

“ The substitution of simultaneous retinal perception of form for successive perception has the effect of bringing together the terms of the relations of variety and contrast, unity and similarity, under what is approximately one act of attention. If we watch the movements of a painter's hand as he draws the outline of a human figure on a canvas, our eye may attain a rough perception of the successive directions and distances ”

“ The visual image is continuous, notwithstanding the retinal stippling and the existence of the blind spot. When we lay our hands on a smooth table we fill in the interstices between the sensational points, and feel the surface as continuous. ”

“ Far beyond the keenest of human vision is its range of sight. If the light is good, this sensitive plate of glass will have recorded and discerned a thousand uplifted faces as perfectly as the human eye perceives the features of a single countenance. Every expression of joy or sorrow, every peculiarity of dress or attitude, the leaves of a forest or the grass by the wayside, will have been seen and delineated and retained perfectly in far less than the briefest possible twinkling of a human eye. ”

“ Her beauty and glory, visible in her tints and hues, are in the brain of the observer,—a play of light reflected from the myriad objects upon which it breaks in infinite diversity of ethereal wavelet's. One may see colors which do not exist as undulations. For example, let one look fixedly at a brilliant red object for a while, and then close his eyes. He will behold an image of the same object of a green color. ”

“ In all of these the light proceeds toward us through an avenue which the sides create. Under this effect we receive the light as it comes to us. In the other form the vision is carried into the picture by a series of mass attractions the balance being less apparent. ”

“ True seeing, observing, is a double process, partly objective or outward—the thing seen and the retina,—and partly subjective or inward—the picture mysteriously transferred to the mind's representative, the brain, and there received and affiliated with other images. Illustrations of such seeing with the "mind's eye" are not far to seek. Wherever the beauties and conformations of natural scenery invite the eye of man, does he discover familiar forms and faces; the forces of nature have rough-hewn the rocks, but the human eye detects and often creates the resemblances. ”

“ It is not merely the outward mechanism and motion of the eyelids, nor the colour of the eyes, that constitutes their beauty; we have already said that the leading characteristic of the eye was expression. It is this expression which causes the eye to appear to speak, to fire up suddenly, to sparkle with flashes of light, to languish or conceal itself underneath its lashes, to raise itself with inspiration, or to pierce the abyss of thought, just according to the particular sentiment governing the mind at the moment. ”

“ Here, in this book, for example, are one hundred photographs of one hundred of the most famous sights, scenes and monuments in the whole world. To see these sights, these scenes, these monuments, is to attain a liberal education. Now what is seeing? Seeing, the philosopher will tell you, is to have certain waves of light strike your eye and create an impression on your retina of the objects that are in front of you. The retina, in other words, is nothing but a natural camera obscura. And what is a photograph? ”

“ If there were such a medium, acting as a mirror to nature or life, and retaining the impression, it must be universal as the supposed æther of the scientist; and how could impressions on this medium intelligible to us be focussed as the vibrations of light are through the needlepoint of the eye to record a single view-point? In our visions of the memory of nature we see undistorted figures. If we could imagine the whole body to be sensitive to light, as is that single point in the brain on which the optic nerves converge, what kind of vision would we have? ”