THOUGHT AND SPACE
- Melancholy, spatial imagination and thought
In the early 17th century, 'melancholy', which was the major form of thought, was decribed as the source of numerous visual illusions: a first form of the spatialisation of thought
see the website on the 'Prehistory of Cognitive Sciences'
especially on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): 'the first to theorize the nature of cognition or engage in cognitive modeling'
- Logic and space
In the 17th century, writers on painting took visual effects, such as the perception of distance, as images of logical notions, such as the relative generality of concepts. So does Henry Peacham in The Gentlemans Exercise (1612).
Gombrich mentions this in his 1961 book on the psychology of perception, Art and Illusion.
- Distance and the association of ideas
The imaginative effect of distance is studied by Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). He argues that distance makes us admire an object because we transfer our admiration from the distance to the object itself, by contiguity.
He also argues that sympathy makes us attribute moral characteristics to buildings, such as the unpleasant impression given by a tottering building even if there is no real danger when we stand at sufficient distance. (III.iii.i)
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature
Book II, Part III, ch.vii, Of Contiguity and Distance in Space and Time ; ch. viii, The same subject continued.
- Sympathy and 'changing places'
Adam Smith studies sympathy in figurative spatial terms, as if it were 'changing places' with someone else (The Theory of Moral Sentiments , 1759)
- Language and anamorphosis
The logical structure of sentences was compared by Dugald Stewart to the complexity of visual tricks such as anamorphosis (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol.III, 1827).
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind , Vol.III (1827), Continuation of Pt.II, Ch.1 Of Language, Section II Of Artificial Language, p.60.
Upon this head of transposition we may remark further, that in consequence of the order observed in the ancient languages, more especially the Latin, the attention of the reader or hearer was kept up completely to the end of the period, where the verb , which is the key to the sentence, was generally to be found. I have elsewhere compared the effect produced by this position of the verb to that of the mirror in a well-known optical experiment, by which the apparently shapeless daubings in an anamorphosis are so reformed as to be converted into a beautiful picture.
