Aldous Huxley - The Art Of Seeing EN

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THE ART OF SEEING
By
ALDOUS HUXLEY
1974
CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON
PUBLISHED BY
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
•
Clarke, Irwin & Co. Ltd.
TORONTO
ISBN O 7011 0788 X
First published 1943
Second impression 1943
Third impression 1943
Fourth impression 1943
Fifth impression 1944
Sixth impression 1948
Seventh impression 1937
Eighth impression 1963
First issued in this edition 1971
Second impression 1974
Applications regarding translation rights in any
work by Aldous Huxley should be addressed to
Chatto & Windus, 40 William IV Street, London,
W.C.2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Chatto
&
Windus Ltd.
©
Mrs. Laura Huxley 1943
Printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge & Esher
CONTENTS
PREFACE
1
CHAPTER I
Medicine and Defective Vision
3
6
CHAPTER II
A Method of Visual Re-Education
CHAPTER III
Sensing+ Selecting+ Perceiving= Seeing
11
14
CHAPTER IV
Variability of Bodily and Mental Functioning
CHAPTER V
Causes of Visual Mal-Functioning: Disease and Emotional Disturbances
17
23
CHAPTER VI
Relaxation
CHAPTER VII
Blinking and Breathing
26
29
CHAPTER VIII
The Eye, Organ of Light
CHAPTER IX
Central Fixation
33
36
CHAPTER X
Methods of Teaching the Eyes and Mind to Move
CHAPTER XI
Flashing
40
43
CHAPTER XII
Shifting
CHAPTER XIII
The Mental Side of Seeing
48
50
CHAPTER XIV
Memory and Imagination
CHAPTER XV
Myopia
57
61
CHAPTER XVI
Long Sight, Astigmatism, Squint
CHAPTER XVII
Some Difficult Seeing-Situations
66
71
CHAPTER XVIII
Lighting Conditions
APPENDIX I
74
APPENDIX II
76
PREFACE
T sixteen, I had a violent attack of
keratitis punctata,
which left me (after
eighteen months of near-blindness, during which I had to depend on Braille for
my reading and a guide for my walking) with one eye just capable of light
perception, and the other with enough vision to permit of my detecting the
two-hundred-foot letter on the Snellen Chart at ten feet. My inability to see was
mainly due to the presence of opacities in the cornea; but this condition was
complicated by hyperopia and astigmatism. For the first few years, my doctors
advised me to do my reading with the aid of a powerful hand magnifying glass. But
later on I was promoted to spectacles. With the aid of these I was able to recognize
the seventy-foot line at ten feet and to read tolerably well—provided always that I
kept my better pupil dilated with atropine, so that I might see round a particularly
heavy patch of opacity at the centre of the cornea. True, a measure of strain and
fatigue was always present, and there were occasions when I was overcome by that
sense of complete physical and mental exhaustion which only eye-strain can
produce. Still, I was grateful to be able to see as well as I could.
Things went on in this way until the year 1939, when, in spite of greatly
strengthened glasses, I found the task of reading increasingly difficult and fatiguing.
There could be no doubt of it: my capacity to see was steadily and quite rapidly
failing. But just as I was wondering apprehensively what on earth I should do, if
reading were to become impossible, I happened to hear of a method of visual
re-education and of a teacher who was said to make use of this method with
conspicuous success. Education sounded harmless enough and, since optical glass
was no longer doing me any good, I decided to take the plunge. Within a couple of
months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain
and fatigue. The chronic tensions, and the occasional spells of complete exhaustion,
were things of the past. Moreover, there were definite signs that the opacity in the
cornea, which had remained unchanged for upwards of twenty-five years, was
beginning to clear up. At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal,
is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles, and before I had
learnt the art of seeing; and the opacity has cleared sufficiently to permit the worse
eye, which for years could do no more than distinguish light from darkness, to
recognize the ten-foot line on the chart at one foot.
It is, first of all, to repay a debt of gratitude that I have written this little
book—gratitude to the pioneer of visual education, the late Dr. W. H. Bates, and to
his disciple, Mrs. Margaret D. Corbett, to whose skill as a teacher I owe the
improvement in my own vision.
A number of other books on visual education have been published—notably Dr.
Bates's own,
Perfect Sight Without Glasses
(New York, 1920), Mrs. Corbett's
How
to Improve Your Eyes
(Los Angeles, 1938) and
The Improvement of Sight by
Natural Methods,
by C. S. Price, M.B.E., D.O. (London, 1934). All have their
merits; but in none (of those, at least, that I have read) has an attempt been made to
do what I have tried to do in the present volume: namely, to correlate the methods
of visual education with the findings of modern psychology and critical philosophy.
My purpose in making this correlation is to demonstrate the essential
reasonableness of a method, which turns out to be nothing more nor less than the
practical application to the problems of vision of certain theoretical principles,
universally accepted as true.
Why, it may be asked, have orthodox ophthalmologists failed to make these
applications of universally accepted principles? The answer is clear. Ever since
ophthalmology became a science, its practitioners have been obsessively
preoccupied with only one aspect of the total, complex process of seeing—the
physiological. They have paid attention exclusively to eyes, not at all to the mind
which makes use of the eyes to see with. I have been treated by men of the highest
eminence in their profession; but never once did they so much as faintly hint that
1
A
there might be a mental side to vision, or that there might be wrong ways of using
the eyes and mind as well as right ways, unnatural and abnormal modes of visual
functioning as well as natural and normal ones. After checking the acute infection
in my eyes, which they did with the greatest skill, they gave me some artificial
lenses and let me go. Whether I used my mind and be-spectacled eyes well or badly,
and what might be the effect upon my vision of improper use, were to them, as to
practically all other orthodox ophthalmologists, matters of perfect indifference. To
Dr. Bates, on the contrary, these things were not matters of indifference; and
because they were not, he worked out, through long years of experiment and
clinical practice, his peculiar method of visual education. That this method was
essentially sound, is proved by its efficacy.
My own case is in no way unique; thousands of other sufferers from defects of
vision have benefited by following the simple rules of that Art of Seeing which we
owe to Bates and his followers. To make this Art more widely known is the final
purpose of the present volume.
2
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