Leonardo da Vinci, because the form of the toy adapts itself more
readily to the anterior image which he has in his consciousness.

It is the same with the Spaniard. Here is one of the causes of his want
of comprehension. One rejects what does not fit in with one's
preconceived scheme of things.

I once rode to Valencia with two priests who were by no means unknown.
One of them had been in the convent of Loyola at Azpeitia for four
years. We talked about our respective homes; they eulogized the
Valencian plain while I replied that I preferred the mountains. 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