As we
passed some bare, treeless hills such as abound near Chinchilla, one of
them--the one, in fact, who had been at Loyola--remarked to me:
"This must remind you of your own country."
I was dumbfounded. How could he identify those arid, parched, glinting
rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded
countryside of Azpeitia? It was easy to see that the anterior image of a
landscape existing in the mind of that priest, provided only the general
idea of a mountain, and that he was unable to distinguish, as I was,
between a green mountain overgrown with turf and trees, and an arid
hillside of dry rocks.
An hypothesis explaining the formation of visual ideas has been
formulated by Wundt, which he calls the hypothesis of projection. It
attributes to the retina an innate power of referring its impressions
outward along straight lines, in directions which are determined.
According to Mueller, who has adopted this hypothesis, what we perceive
is our own retina under the category of space, and the size of the
retinal image is the original unit of measurement applied by us to
exterior objects.
The Spaniard like a child, will have to amplify his retinal image, if he
is ever to amount to anything. He will have to amplify it, and, no
doubt, complicate it also.
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