Note 11 — Chapter II · A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS—AN ANALYSIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN

This psychobiological misconception is doubtless also aided in large measure by the physiological conditions of our visual organs of perception and by the bidimensional surface upon which our impressions of objects are received. Because of the disposition of the nerve terminals of the retina upon a flat or bidimensional area, our visual perception of objects is limited to impressions of a flat or bidimensional plane. If by means of binocular accommodation objects present to us the appearance of “depth,” it is of course not to direct visual perception that we owe our sense of perspective but to stereoscopic inference, seconded by our stereognostic experience of tridimensional solidity. Hence, what is actually “perceived” upon looking at an object of three dimensions is a visual facet, as it were, due to our own mentally flattened “cross-section” of the solid object before us as determined by the particular aspect of it that is momentarily presented to view. I think it cannot be doubted that this mechanism of our visual perception is a contributing factor in influencing our tendency to “see” mentally. One says “I see” when he means “I understand.” There is the same implication in saying that one “sees” the logic of such and such a statement. So, too, we speak of a “mental point of view” or of “intellectual vision.” This illusory character of our mental percepts probably owes its explanation also in part to the fact that our visual sense is the sense that best permits a distant and detached observation of rather than a contact with the surrounding world.