are blends rather than elements.

The Sense of Sight

Of the tremendous number and variety of visual sensations, the great
majority are certainly compounds. Two sorts of compound sensation can
be distinguished here: _blends_ similar to those of taste or smell,
and _patterns_ which scarcely occur among sensations of taste and
smell, though they are found, along with blends, in cutaneous
sensation. Heat, compounded of warmth, cold and pain sensations, is an
{205} excellent example of a blend, while the compound sensation
aroused by touching the skin simultaneously with two points--or three
points, or a ring or square--is to be classed as a pattern. In a
pattern, the component parts are spread out in space or time (or in
both at once), and for that reason are more easily attended to
separately than the elements in a blend. Yet the pattern, like the
blend, has the effect of a unit. A spatial pattern has a
characteristic shape, and a temporal pattern a characteristic course
or movement. A rhythm or a tune is a good example of a temporal
pattern.

Visual sensations are spread out spatially, and thus fall into spatial
patterns. They also are in constant change and motion, and so fall
into temporal patterns, many of which are spatial as well. The visual
sensation aroused, let us say in a young baby, by the light entering
his eye from a human face, is a spatial pattern; the visual sensation
aroused by some one's turning down the light is a pure temporal
pattern; while the sensation from a person seen moving across the room
is a pattern both spatial and temporal. Finding the elements of a
visual pattern would mean finding the smallest possible bits of it,
which would probably be the sensations due to the action of single
rods and cones, just as the smallest bit of a cutaneous sensation
would be due to the exciting of a single touch spot, warmth spot, cold
spot or pain spot.

Analyzing a visual blend is quite a different job. Given the color
pink, for example, let it be required to discover whether this is a
simple sensation or a blend of two or more elementary sensations.
Studying it intently, we see that it can be described as a whitish
red, and if we are willing to accept this analysis as final, we
conclude that pink is a blend of the elementary sensations of white
and red. Of the thousands and thousands of distinguishable hues,
shades {206} and tints, only a few are elements and the rest are color
blends; and our main