Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/201

Rh 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 Reid. I expounded all this, and also the proofs which irrefutably establish the intellectual nature of perception, as long ago as 1816, 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 Reason," § 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 æsthetics 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 brain. 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