The Art of Seeing_Aldous Huxley.pdf

THE ART OF SEEING

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

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W.C.2

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Printed in Great Britain by

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I Medicine and Defective Vision

CHAPTER II A Method of Visual Re-Education

CHAPTER III Sensing+ Selecting+ Perceiving= Seeing

CHAPTER IV Variability of Bodily and Mental Functioning

CHAPTER V Causes of Visual Mal-Functioning: Disease and Emotional Disturbances

CHAPTER VI Relaxation

CHAPTER VII Blinking and Breathing

CHAPTER VIII The Eye, Organ of Light

CHAPTER IX Central Fixation

CHAPTER X Methods of Teaching the Eyes and Mind to Move

CHAPTER XI Flashing

CHAPTER XII Shifting

CHAPTER XIII The Mental Side of Seeing

CHAPTER XIV Memory and Imagination

CHAPTER XV Myopia

CHAPTER XVI Long Sight, Astigmatism, Squint

CHAPTER XVII Some Difficult Seeing-Situations

CHAPTER XVIII Lighting Conditions

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

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

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.

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