VISUAL ARTS Gablik's thesis is somewhat pernicious in that she builds up a sociopsychological argument to present a formalist case and thereby tries to pre-empt opposition from both points of view. Her thesis is roughly this. Art is a mode of cognition. Cognition is never wholly sensuous or perceptual. Rather, perception itself is very much governed by conceptual pre-dispositions. Human history is a history of increasing conceptual clarity about the phenomenal world. With each step, man's perception of the phenomenal world gets changed. These gainful changes in perception-conception interdependence are not random. There is a developmental pattern in them. As the process of cognition goes through different phases of orientation, the appearance of the phenomenal world remains, through several phases, the prime mover. In art, especially, the image of the world of appearances is paramount. Increasingly, however, man seeks the truth behind appearances, in the laws which govern relations and order arrangements. He begins to rely upon abstract mathematical laws. Conception frees itself from the bondage of appearances; perception also demands this freedom. Hence, in art as well, images of the world of appearance lose their validity. Art becomes a reflection of the new forms of cognition. It frees itself from imagist modes; non-referential, conceptual thinking finds form in art. An art that denies appearances appromixates to the kind of thought which contemplates abstract relations and abstract orders; reflecting this highest form of cognition, art becomes both freer, and emotionally neutral. On the one hand Gablik builds her thesis on the supposed scientific findings about development of perceptual - conceptual capacities and intelligence in human individuals; on the other hand, she makes a selective review of the history of visual arts - mainly of the western world, of course. Gablik's mentors, notably the child psychologist, Jean Piaget, came to this general theory about the development of perception and intelligence, by examining a few case histories of human development from childhood to adulthood. The data is taken from western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. On the ba$is of this set of single-point-of-time data thrown up by one civilization only, namely a bour- 34 July-September 1983