The Art of Seeing, Aldous Huxley

Contents

PREFACE
SECTION I
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

SECTION II
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

At 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 center 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 an 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.

SECTION I, CHAPTER I, Medicine and Defective Vision

Medicus curat, natura sanat—the doctor treats, nature heals. The old aphorism sums up the whole scope and purpose of medicine, which is to provide sick organisms with the internal and external conditions most favourable to the exercise of their own self-regulative and restorative powers. If there were no vis medicatrix naturæ, no natural healing powers, medicine would be helpless, and every small derangement would either kill outright or settle down into chronic disease.

When conditions are favourable, sick organisms tend to recover through their own inherent powers of self-healing. If they do not recover it means either that the case is hopeless, or that the conditions are not favourable—in other words, that the medical treatment being applied is failing to achieve what an adequate treatment ought to achieve.

Ordinary Treatment of Defective Sight

In the light of these general principles let us consider the current medical treatment of defects of vision. In the great majority of cases the only treatment consists in fitting the patient with artificial lenses, designed to correct the particular error of refraction which is held to be responsible for the defect. Medicus curat; and in most cases the patient is rewarded by an immediate improvement in vision. But in the meanwhile, what about Nature and her healing process? Do glasses eliminate the causes of defective vision? Do the organs of sight tend to revert to normal functioning as the result of the treatment with artificial lenses? The answer to these questions is, No.

Artificial lenses neutralize the symptoms, but do not get rid of the causes of defective vision. And so far from improving, eyes fitted with these devices tend to grow progressively weaker and to require progressively stronger lenses for the correction of their symptoms. In a word, medicus curat, natura non sanat. From this we can draw one of two conclusions: either defects in the organs of seeing are incurable, and can only be palliated by mechanical neutralization of symptoms; or else something is radically wrong with the current methods of treatment.

Orthodox opinion accepts the first and more pessimistic alternative, and insists that the mechanical palliation of symptoms is the only kind of treatment to which defective organs of vision will respond. (I am leaving out of account all cases of more or less acute disease of the eyes, which are treated by surgery and medication, and confining myself to those much more commonplace visual defects now treated by means of lenses.)

Cure or Palliation of Symptoms?

If orthodox opinion is right—if the organs of vision are incapable of curing themselves, and if their defects can only be palliated by mechanical devices—then the eyes must be totally different in kind from other parts of the body. Given favourable conditions, all other organs tend to free themselves from their defects. Not so the eyes. When they show symptoms of weakness, it is foolish, according to orthodox theory, to make any serious effort to get rid of the causes of those symptoms: it is a waste of time even to try to discover a treatment which will assist nature in accomplishing its normal task of healing. Defective eyes are, ex hypothesi, practically incurable; they lack the vis medicatrix naturæ. The only thing that ophthalmological science can do for them is to provide them with the purely mechanical means for neutralizing their symptoms. The only qualifications to this strange theory come from those who have made it their business to look into external conditions of seeing.

Here, for example, are some