6o THEORETICAL BIOLOGY 



If the observer goes too far away, he loses details, for he 

 now uses fewer local signs than the painter put there, and the 

 full effect of the picture is not realised. 



How is it that we can go so much closer to the pictures 

 of the older Dutch school (from Van Eyck to Holbein) than 

 the view-point of the painter permits, without what is repre- 

 sented being robbed of its verisimilitude ? And how comes it 

 that the things represented, if we look at them from the right 

 standpoint, seem much more real on the picture than the 

 things themselves do, showing us details much better than we 

 could detect them at a corresponding distance ? 



My answer to such questions is that these great painters 

 had at their disposal a much larger number of local signs 

 than we. This enabled them to break up the world into a 

 much greater number of " places," and these furnished them 

 with many more object-signs. The world of these artists was 

 larger and richer than ours. 



On the other hand, it is undeniable that, with the work of 

 some of the more modern painters, the man looking at the 

 picture can see nothing but brush-strokes, from which, even 

 with the best will in the world, he is unable to form objects. 

 Putting aside cases of sheer arbitrariness, this can only mean 

 that the painter has fewer local signs than the observer. 



Let us assume that the observer has lo visual cones to 

 a square millimetre of retina, and that each of these cones 

 stimulates one local sign ; then the painter of the rich world 

 would have loo cones to the same unit of surface, and the 

 painter of the poor world only i. 



The aim of all this argument is merely to make it easier 

 for us to use the same ideas with regard to time ; and we 

 shall now proceed to do so. We have seen that the same 

 picture of the world, when broken up into more numerous 

 places, must of necessity be richer and larger ; in like manner, 

 life must be appraised, not according to the number of 



