unt of new visual facts were
brought to light, particularly those connected with the painting of
sunlight and half light effects. Indeed the whole painting of strong
light has been permanently affected by the work of this group of
painters. Emancipated from the objective world, they no longer dissected
the object to see what was inside it, but studied rather the anatomy of
the light refracted from it to their eyes. Finding this to be composed
of all the colours of the rainbow as seen in the solar spectrum, and
that all the effects nature produced are done with different proportions
of these colours, they took them, or the nearest pigments they could get
to them, for their palette, eliminating the earth colours and black. And
further, finding that nature's colours (the rays of coloured light) when
mixed produced different results than their corresponding pigments mixed
together, they determined to use their paints as pure as possible,
placing them one against the other to be mixed as they came to the eye,
the mixture being one of pure colour rays, not pigments, by this means.

But we are here only concerned with the movement as it affected form,
and must avoid the fascinating province of colour.

Those who had been brought up in the old school of outline form said
there was no drawing in these impressionist pictures, and from the point
of view of the mental idea of form discussed in the last chapter, there
was indeed little, although, had the impression been realised to a
sufficiently definite focus, the sense of touch and solidity would
probably have been satisfied. But the particular field of this new
point of view, the beauty of tone and colour relations considered as an
impression apart from objectivity, did not tempt them to carry their
work so far as this, or the insistence on these particular qualities
would have been lost.

But interesting and alluring as is the new world of visual music opened
up by this point of view, it is beginning to be realised that it has
failed somehow to satisfy. In the first place, the implied assumption
that one sees with the eye alone is wrong:

"In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it
what the eye brings means of seeing,"[2]

[Footnote 2: Goethe, quoted in Carlyle's _French Revolution_, chap. i.]

and it is the mind behind the eye that supplies this means of
perception: #one sees with the mind#. The ultimate effect of any
picture, be it impr