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76 THE FOURFOLD ROOT. [CHAP. IV,
discovered the latter. For instance, we instantly recognise
while drawing a
a chair, whatever position it may be in ;
chair in any position belongs to the art which abstracts
from this third process of the Understanding, in order to pre
sent the data alone for the spectator himself to complete.
In its narrowest acceptation, as we have already seen, this is
the art of drawing in perspective ; in a -more comprehensive
sense, it is the whole art of painting. A painting presents
us with outlines drawn according to the rules of perspec
tive ; lighter and darker places proportioned to the effect
of light and shade; finally patches of colouring, which
are determined as to quality and intensity by the teaching
of experience. This the spectator reads and interprets by
referring similar effects to their accustomed causes. The
painter s art consists in consciously retaining the data of
visual sensation in the artist s memory, as they are before
this third intellectual process ; while we, who are not artists,
cast them aside without retaining them in our memory,
as soon as we have made use of them for the purpose
described above. We shall become still better acquainted
with this third intellectual process by now passing on to a
fourth, which, from its intimate connection with the third,
serves to elucidate it.
This fourth operation of the "Understanding
consists in
from us :
acquiring knowledge of the distance of objects
it is this precisely which constitutes that third dimension
of which we have been speaking. Visual sensation, as we
have said, gives us the direction in which objects lie, but
not their distance from us : that is, not their position. It
is for the Understanding
therefore to find out this dis
tance; or, in other words, the distance must be inferred
from purely causal determinations. Now the most im
portant of these is the visual angle, which objects subtend ;
yet even this is quite ambiguous and unable to decide
anything by itself. It is like a word of double meaning :