JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Edited by MADISON BENTLEY, Stanford University THREE NEW BOOKS ON MAN'S DISCOVERY OF His WORLD Constitutive, not explorational, discovery of a world which, touched by man's lore, discerning observation and sentiments, becomes Nature; revised by his values of mine and our becomes Human Nature; distilled in the alembic of physical science becomes Cosmos; and transformed by man's fine and tectonic arts and by his labor and learning becomes the busy Theater of Living of the individual, of peoples, institutions and races. In the three books under review three men now undertake to explain how the individual hominid organism creates for itself the primary outlines of a segment of one of these versions of the world. Gibson's segment is visual perceiving. Johansson's is visual perceiving supplemented by auditory and tactual resources. Cantril's is a system of valuations created by personalized participants in life's 'transactions.' The expositions of the first two men suggest the point of view of certain phenomenologists (especially David Katz): the last names Adelbert Ames as supplying a special challenge to his "understanding of men's thought and behavior"; although many other individuals, in psychology, philosophy, evolution, neurology and the social sciences, influenced the 'general intellectual climate' under which his work has developed. All three decry a popular point of view which has set in first place a rigid causal relationship between behavior and environment. (i) The Perception of the Visual World.
An essential element in visual perception is one indicated by the terms edge, boundary, contour or line. Things are seen because they are delimited from the rest of the visual field and this delimitation depends on, or consists of, the formation of a visual line. A line has the function of enclosing, in addition to its function of simply delimiting, but we are here concerned with it in the latter function only. Conceived in this way a visual line, or any designated portion of a line, may be said to have two characteristics: its shape, straight, curved, or 'bent,' and its direction, vertical, horizontal, or oblique. It has already been demonstrated that the shape of a line is subject to what has been termed adaptation and negative after-effect with respect to rectilinearity. That is, a curved or bent line-segment changes during continuous perception in the direction of becoming straight, and thereafter an objectively straight line appears curved the opposite way. 1 By analogy, the direction of a line might be expected to behave in the same manner with respect to the vertical and the horizontal axes. Experimental test of this possibility bears out the expectation; that is, a line seen as tilted somewhat from the vertical or the horizontal axis appears progressively less tilted during the course of perception, and a line objectively vertical or horizontal appears thereafter as tilted in the opposite direction. 2 In short,
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