The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Wlassak - Zur Psychologie der Landschaft
The effect of landscape upon the mind is characterized by a peculiar feeling of significance not explained by the separate objects that meet the eye. What is the content of this unexplained element? The basal feeling in landscape-presentation is that of environment pure and simple — of the not-me. This element is due to nature's independence of us — an independence not ascribed to the walls and furniture of our rooms. But the awe or fear naturally accompanying the sense of outwardness is modified by the fact that a landscape does not confine our thoughts, which may pass at will into the illimitable beyond; thus the scene becomes after all an extension of ourself. The sense of meaning in landscape depends on the connection of self and not-self through the relation of nature to the maintenance of physical and psychical life. Whether the feeling is primary or due to association can be only probably determined, owing to our ignorance of the elements of psychical life. But it seems likely that it has no direct connection with particular sense-experiences in the past, except so far as similarity of colors, space-relations, etc., is necessary to preserve the continuity of presentations. If it were determined by association, the sense of the illimitable would be absent, and agreement of feeling between individuals merely accidental, since the state of each would depend on associations peculiar to himself. We must then suppose that not association but something primary in nerve-structure lies at the root of the sense of significance in landscape, and that the latter depends on a dim and diffused consciousness of the effect of light, air, color, space, in their favorable and unfavorable influences upon life. To the analysis of this state of consciousness our knowledge is, of course, inadequate. This suggests only the universal elements of landscape presentation, which is really the assemblage of sense-perceptions under selective direction of certain subjective factors. These factors are related not chiefly to particular elements of consciousness, as in association, though associative links of course have their part, but rather to the temperament and mood of the observer. Further, the process of landscape-presentation normally converges to a dominant aspect, in most cases connected with the observer's personal activity. This final phase of the scene, in which all the elements are resolved into harmony, may centre round an idea, an event, or a personality.