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at to mystic institute.org. All right. Well, the title of this talk could have easily

have been water, light, and color for St. Thomas, although the notion of ontological status, I guess,

is what sort of things, right? What kind of reality

do these things have? To begin, there's a lot of background to issues of the nature of light,

the nature of color, and they all primarily center if we go back to ancient philosophy on

theories of vision. I was originally planning to have a little kind of outline of various ancient theories of vision,

go into some details, but I was discovering that this was taking it too much time from actually getting to the real meat of the matter.

So I'll just give a brief overview summary. We have two basic schools of thought when it comes to vision among ancient thinkers.

We have the emission or extramission theory, which we find, for example, in Plato.

Plato thought that the eye was made out of fire.

Now, in the ancient world, there were thought to be four elements, as Professor Carl's

mentioned, the elements, right, the most basic constituents of things, earth, air, fire,

and water. And so the thought is, air, fire, and water.

And so the thought is that there is fire in the eyes. Why will you search, in the dark,

you see maybe the eyes of a cat gleam, right, or certain things along these lines?

And so the thought of Plato is that that fire sends light out from the eyes, and that

somehow comes in contact with the objects.

And so we make contact with the objects and we in a certain way by this light emission or these sight rays kind of feel the object.

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