But this approach created a problem, a philosophical difficulty—the philosophical difficulty, when you come to think about it. When artists stopped holding the mirror up to nature, when they held the mirror instead to the mind of man, they were essentially holding a mirror up to a mirror. For man to see only what man sees is to see endless reflections of himself, empty of certainty and of certain meaning. As one of the greatest of the Romantic poets, William Blake, put it, “The eye altering, alters all.”
