The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

again, if something feels cold we ask ourselves whether it may not be that we have very warm hands.

When we hear a sound we sometimes doubt whether it was really an affection of our sense of hearing from without or merely an inner affection of it ; then whether it sounded near and weak or far off and strong, then from what direction it came, and finally whether it was the voice of a man or of a brute, or the sound of an instrument ; thus we investigate the cause of each effect we experience.

In the case of smell and taste uncertainty as to the objective nature of the cause of the effect felt is of the commonest occurrence, so distinctly are the two separated here.

The fact that in sight the transition from the effect to the cause occurs quite unconsciously, and hence the illusion arises that this kind of perception is perfectly direct, and consists simply in the sensation alone without any operation of the understanding — this has its explanation partly in the great perfection of the organ of vision, and partly in the exclusively rectilineal action of light.

On account of the latter circumstance the impression itself leads directly to the place of the cause, and since the eye is capable of perceiving with the greatest exactness and at a glance all the fine distinctions of light and shade, colour and outline, and also the data in accordance with which the understanding estimates distance, it thus happens that in the case of impressions of this sense the operation of the understanding takes place with such rapidity and certainty that we are just as little conscious of it as of spelling when we read.

Hence arises the delusion that the sensation itself presents us directly with the objects.

Yet it is just in sight that the operation of the understanding, consisting in the knowledge of the cause from the effect, is most significant By means of it what is felt doubly, with two eyes, is perceived as single ; by means of it the impression which strikes the retina upside down, in consequence of the crossing of the rays in the pupils, is put right by following back the cause of this in the same

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direction, or as we express ourselves, we see things upright although their image in the eye is reversed ; and finally by means of the operation of the understanding magnitude and distance are estimated by us in direct perception from five different data, which are very clearly and beautifully described by Dr. Thomas Eeid. I expounded all this, and also the proofs which irrefutably establish the intellectual nature of perception, as long ago as 18 16, in my essay " On Sight and Colour" (second edition, 1854 ; third edition, 1870), and with important additions fifteen years later in the revised Latin version of it which is given under the title, " Theoria Colorum Physiologica Eademque Primaria" in the third volume of the " Scriptores Ophthalmologici Minores," published by Justus Radius in 1830 ; yet most fully and thoroughly in the second (and third) edition of my essay " On the Principle of Sufficient Eeason," § 21. Therefore on this important subject I refer to these works, so as not to extend unduly the present exposition.

On the other hand, an observation which trenches on the province of aesthetics may find its place here. It follows from the proved intellectual nature of perception that the sight of beautiful objects — for example, of a beautiful view — is also a phenomenon of the orain. Its purity and completeness, therefore, depends not merely on the object, but also upon the quality of the brain, its form and size, the fineness of its texture, and the stimulation of its activity by the strength of the pulse of the arteries which supply it. Accordingly the same view appears in different heads, even when the eyes are equally acute, as different as, for example, the first and last impressions of a copper plate that has been much used. This is the explanation of the difference of capacity for enjoying natural beauty, and consequently also for reproducing it, i.e., for occasioning a similar phenomenon of the brain by means of an entirely different kind of cause, the arrangement of colours on a canvas.

The apparent immediacy of perception, depending on

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