SOURCE: Halstead, Frank G. “The Optics of Love: Notes on a Concept of Atomistic Philosophy in the Theatre of Tirso de Molina.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America LVIII, No. 1, Part 1 (March 1943): 108-21.

In the following essay, Halstead analyzes Tirso's philosophical arguments in El amor médico regarding the connection between vision and love.

Somewhat more than a century and a quarter past, Dugald Stewart, philosopher and critic second only to Sir William Hamilton, wrote:

In considering the phenomena of perception, it is natural to suppose that the attention of philosophers would be directed, in the first instance, to the sense of seeing. The variety of information and of enjoyment we received by it; the rapidity with which this information and enjoyment are conveyed to us; and above all, the intercourse it enables us to maintain with the more distant part of the universe, cannot fail...