1971 School Magazine

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world continue to be a part of himself as long as he moves in it. Man and his environment are vitally linked: each life is a life within this world, accepting its realities and seeing with its light. As each individual personality of man sees his world, so it impresses him differentty; the self, of tt.cessitv absorbEd in the relation to its environment, is formea by its world, and yet each self is formed differently and with an individual vision' No man is a blank sheet on which is printed the stamp of his physical environment, but each man needs his invironment to realize himself and his own will to live. Each man is part of his world' and the-world is the creating force^of the man;.and yet eachman is created an-individual and inviolate entity. Sight, the senses, vision, life, are the reactions between the human personality and the world in which it must live. And so a man's sight, a man's vision of this world is the man himself. We are so basically and iompletely one with our world, by the very nature of our'life, ihut out reactions to it are in fact the formation of our own personalities; we are so dependent on the environment that only-through it .uir *. find the expression of our personalities' Thus the active living relition between man and the world he apprehends creates the man; and-the man thus shapcd perceives the world in accordance with his own unique nature. To "see" a tree, then, as in the quotation from Blake, is to live and relive the sum of our experiences "tree'i which the environment has given us. It is to take object "tree" into our eyes and into ourselves, to allow ii to become part of ourselves' One man sees a tree and is immediitely and involuntarily seized -by the total concapt "tree" which his environment has imoressed on him: it is a distinct, unique and personal imlpe created bv his own nature and the nature of his *orTd. And furiher, this tree is creating the man of the future, for it has become a part of him through his senses. It has added to the total personal memory of sense-images, it has infiltrated into the mind and oersonalitv t'tuoueh the sense of sight. The tree has iprung acioss thelulf between man and the external riorld-by means of the bridge of sight. As a man sees, so he becomes-so his environment is related to him and creates his consciousness. And as a man is, so too does he see: the sum of hispersonal consciouiness and experience determines his future reaction to the world and vision of it. Sight, vision and the world are one, and man is one with his world; this is the way we are made and the way we live'

' "The Tree that moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way", As a man is, so he sees'. We are ol this world; springing from it, living through it, seeing with the light of this world and existiig by its laws. Our existence and our awareness are heri, ind here is the source of all our vision and endeavour. For as we are born we come to awareness of ourselves only through this world into which we come; this thing, ourself, is projected unaware into the physical woild, and realizes itself o4V through its relatlonship with its environment. We come to consciousniss of self only through consciousness of the world in which the self moves. The child sees the spinning, flowing, brilliant world in relation to ifself-an environment for the self: alien, extra- ordinary, compelling and mysterious, the world is the coloured mirror on which the child, projects it ego' And we grow in our physical world and through it; shaped and correlatea Uy the environme.nt-and our t.uitio.ts to it. Like a printed single-celled life we absorb the world through the screens bf our senses: it becomes part of our very minds and personalities. We are our e-nvironment, the correlation and creation of the world; we are the world in which we live- And so the relation between our world and ourselves is almost one of creation. What we are, what we have become, is the result of the interaction between this isolated human entity and its environ- ment. We see ourselves and our lives through our worldl we are absorbed in our external environment because only in this way can we realise our internal beings. The child absorbed in playing with mud or sandot the adult striving to built a home for his family are both aspects of the same necessity in man: the necessity for integration and reaction with the environment. This is our world, the only eistence we know, and only in relation to it can we achieve our own existence. The ways in which we perceive our world are the senses. They are the shifting, vague, untrustworthy, incomprehensible clouds that surround us to both conneit us to the exterior world and obscure it; they are the only link between ourselves and our world. And of theie senses the most vital and basic is sight. We see, and we are: we see, and the world is part of ourselves. It is significant that when we wish to say "I understand" we often say, "I see". Sight is the reaction between ourselves and the world, the way in which we become integrated with part of it. So a human being and his world are inevitably linked together throrrgh the senses, so too will his

Cecily Greaves

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