The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic TheorySantayana, George
Philosophy
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
Santayana, George
Aesthetics
An answer to this question has been suggested by various
psychologists. The eye, by an instinctive movement, turns so as to
bring every impression upon that point of the retina, near its centre,
which has the acutest sensibility. A series of muscular sensations
therefore always follows upon the conspicuous excitement of any
outlying point. The object, as the eye brings it to the centre of
vision, excites a series of points upon the retina; and the local sign,
or peculiar quality of sensation, proper to each of these spots, is
associated with that series of muscular feelings involved in turning
the eyes. These feelings henceforth revive together; it is enough
that a point in the periphery of the retina should receive a ray, for
the mind to feel, together with that impression, the suggestion of a
motion, and of the line of points that lies between the excited point
and the centre of vision. A network of associations is thus formed,
whereby the sensation of each retinal point is connected with all
the others in a manner which is that of points in a plane. Every
visible point becomes thus a point in a field, and has a felt
radiation of lines of possible motion about it. Our notion of visual
space has this origin, since the manifold of retinal impressions is
distributed in a manner which serves as the type and exemplar of
what we mean by a surface.
_Values of geometrical figures._
Sec. 21. The reader will perhaps pardon these details and the strain
they put on his attention, when he perceives how much they help
us to understand the value of forms. 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. The definition of space as the
possibility of motion is therefore an accurate and significant one,
since the most direct and native perception of space we can have is
the awakening of many tendencies to move our organs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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