United States or Guyana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is not, therefore, the sensation which misleads him, but the judgment based on it. It is the same when any one sees for the first time a mirror or optical apparatus; or enters a deep cellar in mid-winter or midsummer; or plunges his hand, either very warm or very cold, into tepid water; or rolls a little ball between two of his fingers held crosswise.
The way thither was through the large chamber he had used as a study and for the manufacture of optical instruments. There lay the large pasteboard telescope, that had been just such a failure as Crusoe's large boat; there were his diagrams, maps, globes, and celestial apparatus of various sorts.
The single alphabet demands much less from the optical memory, and the corresponding motor inner attitude of consciousness is adjusted to a smaller number of possibilities. But the pressure on the shift key, which goes with the single alphabet, is not only a time-wasting act; from the psychological point of view it is first of all a very strong interruption of the uniform chain of impulses.
I made him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the victims, like ordinary, ignorant people. "We are in a room, a little room; that is what you must keep saying to yourself. And we shall leave the room as soon as we have found the door."
He answered, as every "common-sensible" person of course would, that it was strange, but that such things did happen sometimes and were classed by the wise under the head of 'optical delusions. I was not well, perhaps, he suggested. Been over-working? Had I not better see a doctor? But I shook my head. I was quite well, and I said so.
The height of the paradox was achieved when a silly nomenclature was devised to meet every vacillation of the human temperament. If you feared to cross the street you suffered from agoraphobia; if you didn't fear to cross the street, that too was a very bad sign. If you painted like Monet, paralysis of the optical centre had set in but why continue?
Then she went on, casting glances at the windows of small stores, and finally stopped before a little shop, dark and uninviting, whose soiled glass front revealed odds and ends of old jewelry, watches, optical goods and bric-a-brac that had a sordid aspect. She had long ago noticed the ancient sign disposed behind the panes. It bore the words: "We buy Old Gold and Jewelry"
There's a pleasant sense of swelling fullness about the river; it may be an optical delusion, but I am inclined to believe it is a fact that the surface is slightly convex, like an old-fashioned mirror, perhaps an inch or two higher in the middle than at the sides. There is not much depth to spare, already we have touched bottom.
The impatience of these bold divers cannot be described, and having an electrical communication with the corvette, they made a signal already agreed upon, and for the space of a mile the Susquehanna moved their chamber along some yards above the bottom. Thus they explored the whole submarine plain, deceived at every turn by optical illusions which almost broke their hearts.
"Well, now, that would have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston, "if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous. And still more if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly the result of excited feelings."
Word Of The Day