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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 22 Jul 2023

Taken: 21 Jul 2023

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EYE OF THE BEHOLDER •
Laura Snyder •
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Active Eye

Active Eye
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Many ancient writers believed in the “active eye” – they thought the eyes sees by sending rays out from within itself to the object being viewed. The eye, as the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus wrote, send out its “fire within”. Plato had a more complex idea of seeing, in which the eye sends out rays from its inner fire, which meet and coalesce with the rays coming from the sun, forming “a single homogenous body in a direct line with the eyes . . .and thus causes the sensation we call seeing. Later, Aristotle rejected the notion that there is an emanation from the eyes, arguing instead that the eye receives rays from an object or the air. Constantijn Huygens contrasted the two competing views of vision in verse:

Here our eyes are [seen as] bows,
And shoot out rays: there it’s [deemed] a gross lie,
There it’s naught but mirror glass that takes things in.

In the third century BCE the Greek mathematician Euclid connected theories of vision to mathematics. In his ‘Optica,’ he defined the visual process in a purely geometrical way: rays proceed in straight lines from the eye, radiating outward to objects in the shape of cone. This cone, with its apex at the eye and its base at the object viewed, became known in the eleventy century as “the pyramid of vision” . . . .Page 76

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
14 months ago. Edited 14 months ago.

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