Note 47 — Chapter XVII
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It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see things right-side up. Our consciousness is naïvely supposed to inhabit the picture and to feel the picture's position as related to other objects of space. But the truth is that the picture is non-existent either as a habitat or as anything else, for immediate consciousness. Our notion of it is an enormously late conception. The outer object is given immediately with all those qualities which later are named and determined in relation to other sensations. The 'bottom' of this object is where we see what by touch we afterwards know as our feet, the 'top' is the place in which we see what we know as other people's heads, etc., etc. Berkeley long ago made this matter perfectly clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, §§ 93-98, 113-118).