of
colour and light revealed by the eye, the two-dimensional being thus
turned into the three-dimensional in our everyday experience. But
the mistakes we occasionally make, for instance taking a road seen
from above for a church-tower projecting out of the plain, or the
perspective of a mountain range for its cubic shape, occasionally
reveal that we do not really _see_ three-dimensional objects, but
merely _infer_ them by connecting visual data with the result of
locomotor experience. The truth of this commonplace of psychology
can be tested by the experiment of making now one, now the other,
colour of a floor pattern seem convex or concave according as we
think of it as a light flower on a dark ground, or as a white cavity
banked in by a dark ridge. And when the philistine (who may be you
or me!) exclaims against the "out of drawing" and false perspective
of unfamiliar styles of painting, he is, nine times out of ten, merely
expressing his inability to identify two-dimensional shapes as
"representing" three-dimensional things; so far proving that we do
not decipher the cubic relations of a picture until we have guessed
what that picture is supposed to stand for. And this is my reason for
saying that visible shapes, though they may be aspects of cubic
objects, have no body; and that the thought of their volume, their
weight and their texture, is due to an interruption of our
contemplation of shape by an excursion among the recollections of
qualities which shapes, _as_ shapes, cannot possess.

And here I would forestall the Reader's objection that the feeling of
effort and resistance, essential to all our empathic dealings with
two-dimensional shapes, must, after all, be due to _weight,_ which we
have just described as a quality shapes cannot possess. My answer is
that Empathy has extracted and schematised effort and resistance by
the elimination of the thought of weight, as by the elimination of the
awareness of our bodily tensions; and that it is just this elimination
of all incompatible qualities which allows us to attribute activities to
those two-dimensional shapes, and to feel these activities, with a
vividness undiminished by the thought of any other circumstances.

With cubic existence (and its correlative three-dimensional
space), with weight and texture we have therefore got from the
contemplated shape to a thought alien to that shape and its
contemplation. The thought, to which life and its needs and dangers