Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/108

 discovered the latter. For instance, we instantly recognise a chair, whatever position it may be in; while drawing a chair in any position belongs to the art which abstracts from this third process of the Understanding, in order to present the data alone for the spectator himself to complete. In its narrowest acceptation, as we have already seen, this is the art of drawing in perspective; in a more comprehensive sense, it is the whole art of painting. A painting presents us with outlines drawn according to the rules of perspective; lighter and darker places proportioned to the effect of light and shade; finally patches of colouring, which are determined as to quality and intensity by the teaching of experience. This the spectator reads and interprets by referring similar effects to their accustomed causes. The painter's art consists in consciously retaining the data of visual sensation in the artist's memory, as they are before this third intellectual process; while we, who are not artists, cast them aside without retaining them in our memory, as soon as we have made use of them for the purpose described above. We shall become still better acquainted with this third intellectual process by now passing on to a fourth, which, from its intimate connection with the third, serves to elucidate it.

This fourth operation of the Understanding consists in acquiring knowledge of the distance of objects from us: it is this precisely which constitutes that third dimension of which we have been speaking. Visual sensation, as we have said, gives us the direction in which objects lie, but not their distance from us: that is, not their position. It is for the Understanding therefore to find out this distance; or, in other words, the distance must be inferred from purely causal determinations. Now the most important of these is the visual angle, which objects subtend; yet even this is quite ambiguous and unable to decide anything by itself. It is like a word of double meaning: