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 impressionist, post, anti, or otherwise—­is its power to stimulate these mental perceptions within the mind.

But even from the point of view of the true visual perception (if there is such a thing) that modern art has heard so much talk of, the copying of the retina picture is not so great a success.  The impression carried away from a scene that has moved us is not its complete visual aspect.  Only those things that are significant to the felt impression have been retained by the mind; and if the picture is to be a true representation of this, the significant facts must be sorted out from the mass of irrelevant