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Idomenian Vision: The Empirical Basis of Thomas Reid’s Geometry of Visibles

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Abstract

Thomas Reid (1720–1796) claims to have learned of Idomenians, “an order of beings” in “sublunary regions” whose visual system is very much like ours except that they could detect only the direction of rays reaching their eyes, not the distance of origin. The properties of Idomenian vision are here examined in the light of the physiological optics of Reid’s time and of the scientific developments that have since augmented our knowledge of the discipline.

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Notes

  1. Smith was quite specific about using the center of the entrance pupil as the pivot point for the rays from the object to the eye. It is located in the eye’s optical object space, i.e., in air, about 3 mm behind the cornea and has its image-sided correlate, from which the rays diverge to the retina, about 20 mm in front of the retina, i.e., a considerable distance from the center of the ocular globe, which is about 12 mm from the retina. Many subsequent writers refer to the center of the eye, which is not what Smith and Reid meant. The difference is, however, not significant in the context of the discussions of visibles.

  2. By writing that a “material impression made on a particular point of the retina suggests two things to the mind, namely the colour, and the position of some external object” Reid was again ahead of his time. The counterposition of “point on the retina” and “position of some external object” (in Reid’s scheme, the direction of the incoming ray) essentially anticipates the definition of Localzeichen by Lotze (1852, p. 331) who, as did Reid, also included qualities beyond spatial signature in the term. “So muss jede Erregung vermöge des Punktes im Nervensystems, an welchem sie stattfindet, eine eigenthümliche Färbung erhalten, die wir mit dem Namen ihres Localzeichens belegen wollen”. Elsewhere it has been documented how Reid had anticipated another tenet of vision science, Hering’s law of equal innervation of both eyes, by a century (Westheimer 2014). It is curious that neither Hering nor Lotze, two giants in nineteenth-century sensory physiology and perception, appeared to have been aware of Reid’s writing. Nor, for that matter, was Helmholtz, the acknowledged leader in the field.

  3. The author is grateful to Hannes Ole Matthiessen for making him aware of the eighteenth-century physiological optics of Thomas Reid, for providing references to contemporary contributions and for helpful discussion.

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  1. Division of Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720-3200, USA

    Gerald Westheimer

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  1. Gerald Westheimer
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Correspondence to Gerald Westheimer.

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Westheimer, G. Idomenian Vision: The Empirical Basis of Thomas Reid’s Geometry of Visibles . Topoi 35, 479–483 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9287-y

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