THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 243 



our attention in a peculiar way make him appear to do so. 

 The whole education of the artist consists in his learning 

 to see the presented signs as well as the represented things. 

 No matter what the field of view means, he sees it also as 

 a feels — that is, as a collection of patches of color bounded 

 by lines — the whole forming an optical diagram of whose 

 intrinsic proi^ortions one who is not an artist has hardly a 

 conscious inkling. The ordinary man's attention passes 

 over them to their import ; the artist's turns back and 

 dwells upon them for their own sake. ' Don't draw the 

 thing as it is, but as it looks ! ' is the endless advice of every 

 teacher to his pupil ; forgetting that what it ' is ' is what it 

 would also * look,' provided it were placed in what we have 

 called the ' normal ' situation for vision. In this situation 

 the sensation as ' sign ' and the sensation as ' object ' co- 

 alesce into one, and there is no contrast between them. 



Sensations which seem Suppressed. 



But a great difficulty has been made of certain peculiar 

 cases which we must now turn to consider. They are cases 

 in which a present sensation, lohose existence is supposed to be 

 proved by its outward conditions being there, seems absolutely 

 suppressed or changed by the image of the * thing ' it suggests. 



This matter carries us back to what was said on p. 218. 

 The passage there quoted from Helmholtz refers to these 

 cases. He thinks they conclusively disprove the original 

 and intrinsic spatiality of any of our retinal sensations ; 

 for if such a one, actually jJi'eseut, had an immanent and 

 essential space-determination of its own, that might well 

 be added to and overlaid or even momentarily eclipsed by 

 suggestions of its signification, but how could it possibly 

 be altered or completely suppressed thereby ? Of actually 

 present sensations, he says, being suppressed by suggestions 

 of experience — 



' ' We have not a single well-attested example. In all those illusions 

 which are provoked by sensations in the absence of their usually excit- 

 ing objects, the mistake never vanishes by the better understanding of 

 the object really present, and by insight into the cause of deception. 

 Phosphenes provoked by pressure on the eyeball, by traction on the en- 

 trance of the optic nerve, after-images, etc., remain projected into their 

 apparent place in the field of vision, just as the image projected from 



