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BENJAMIN WELLES REMARKER 1806
When Allston was in Paris in 1804, he was there with Benjamin Welles, a Harvard classmate. [Gerdts and Stebbins, p. 381] After Paris, Allston travelled to Italy. While Allston was still in Europe, his friend Welles, back in Boston, wrote Remarker, No. 10 that was published in the Monthly Anthology, June 1806. Concerning the "love of Nature," Welles wrote,
It is purely spiritual, because it is produced by the perceptions of the mind, of what is abstractly beautiful, and it is rapturous in that sympathy which rebounds from the coincidence of natural and ideal beauty.
Welles describes pareidolia, with his statements. Compare his words to the requirements for pareidolia.
  1. There is an external object in the line of sight.
    (Welles words, "natural" beauty)
  2. There is an internal object stored in the viewer’s memory.
    (Welles words, "ideal" beauty)
  3. There are objective correlatives existing in the external material being viewed that correspond to characteristics of the individual's internally stored memory of an object previously experienced, such that the visual characteristics of the external objective object blends with the remembered internal subjective object and the material is seen as the remembered object, even though the remembered object is not physically present.
    (Welles words, "rebounds from the coincidence of natural and ideal beauty" and "...it is produced by the perceptions of the mind, of what is abstractly beautiful")

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Copyright 1992-2015 Peter Bueschen
The presentation is available at The Obtuse Bard website http://obtusebard.org.