ten minutes’ study is quite inadequate in the case of unfamiliar kinds of work, and that the capacity for ‘seeing’ pictures (in sense three), an indispensable but merely an initial step to appreciating them, is something which has to be acquired. It is naturally of great assistance if many works by the same painter or of the same School can be seen together, for then the essential methods employed become clearer. In a general collection it is difficult not to look at too great a variety of pictures, and a confusion results, perhaps unnoticed, which is a serious obstacle to the coherent building up of any one picture. The fashion in which most Old Masters are hidden away under grime and glass and the efforts which are necessary in order to reconstruct them are additional obstacles. The neglect of these obvious facts is the chief explanation of the low level of appreciation and criticism from which the art of painting at present suffers. Following upon the visual images are a swarm of others varying from picture to picture: tactile images giving the appearance of texture to surfaces, muscular images giving hardness, stiffness, softness, flexibility and so on to the volumes imagined—the lightness and insubstantiality of muslin, the solidity and fixity of rock being matters of the intervention of images due originally to the sensations we have received in the past from these materials. This muscular imagery is of course called up in differing ways in different cases. Primarily it is due to the imitation by the artist of subtleties in the light given off by the materials, or characteristic peculiarities in their form, but there are, as we shall see, more indirect but also less stable, less reliable and less efficacious ways by which they may be evoked. The same applies to the other images, thermal, olfactory, auditory and the rest, which may be involved in particular cases. There is a direct and an indirect way in which they can be evoked. They may spring up at the visual appeal or they may only respond at a later stage as a result of roundabout trains of thinking. Thus a silk scarf may _look_ soft and light; or we may imagine it as light, it _looking_ all the while iron-hard and heavy, because we know that it is a scarf and that scarves are soft and light. The two methods are very different. The second is a reversal of the natural order of perception and for this reason the condemnation so often heard from painters, of the literary or ‘detective’ approach to pictures, of which this would be a representative specimen, is well merited. We must, however, distinguish cases in which there is this reversal from those in which it does not occur, those namely in which by a process of inference we arrive at conclusions about the represented objects which could not possibly be directly given. But this question may be deferred until we come to discuss representation.