Rudolph Arnheim's Discussion on Visual Thinking

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 5, Chapter 2, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Rudolph Arnheirn discusses this point in his Visual Thinking. According to him, Aristotle conceives of the "universal character " of an object "directly perceived in it as its essence rather than indirectly collected through the search of common elements in the various specimens of a species or genus " (P. 12). Robert Hewison discusses Ruskin and Arnheim in his John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, 208-209 -- and see all of the important concluding chapter.

Last modified December 2000