INTRODUCTION: VISION AND VISUAL ANALOGY DURING THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Summary

In some country everyone is blind from birth. Some are eager for knowledge and aspire after truth. Sooner or later one of them will say, “You see, sirs, how we cannot walk straight along our way, but rather we frequently fall into holes. But I do not believe that the whole human race is under such a handicap, for the natural desire that we have to walk straight is not frustrated in the whole race. So I believe that there are some men who are endowed with a faculty for setting themselves straight.”

Nicholas of Autrecourt, Exigit ordo (ca. 1330)

Tired of falling into holes, someone in a country where everyone is blind from birth dreams of the ability to avoid falling into holes. Unfortunately, nothing is foolproof and Thales, reputed to have been the very first of the Presocratic philosophers and someone who, I imagine, could see as well as the next person, still had his problems with holes. As an ancient and probably apocryphal anecdote would have it, one day Thales fell into a well while looking up at the stars. We know all this because a witty servant girl just happened to be on the scene, ready with a quip and eager to gossip. Late in the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne would include this anecdote in his Apology for Raymond Sebond. According to Montaigne, Thales does not simply fall into the well.