Martin Gardner described "The Art of Seeing" as "a book destined to rank beside Bishop Berkeley’s famous treatise on the medicinal properties of ‘tar-water’"  Philip Pollack commented   Huxley sounds in his book like Bates out of Oxford with a major in psychology and metaphysics. Bates wrote of relaxation but Huxley brings in transcendentalism. Tension and poor vision are caused by the refusal of the individual ego to surrender to Nature.