At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles, and before I had learnt the art of seeing; and the opacity has cleared sufficiently to permit the worse eye, which for years could do no more than distinguish light from darkness, to recognise the ten-foot line on the chart at one foot.
It is, first of all, to repay a debt of gratitude that I have written this little book-- gratitude to the pioneer of visual education, the late Dr. W. H. Bates, and to his disciple, Mrs. Margaret D. Corbett, to whose skill as a teacher I owe the improvement in my own vision.
A number of other books on visual education have been published-—notably Dr. Bates’s own, Perfect Sight lVit/tout Glasses (New York, 1920), Mrs. Corbett’s How to Improve Your Eyes (Los Angeles, 1938) and The Improvement of Sight by Natural Methods, by C. S. Price, M.B.E., D.O. (London, 1934). All have their merits; but in none (of those, at least, that have read) has an attempt been made to do what I have tried to do in the present volume: namely, to correlate the methods of visual education with the findings of modern psychology and critical philosophy. My purpose in making this correlation is to demonstrate the essential reasonableness of a method, which turns out to be nothing more nor less than the practical application to the problems of vision of certain theoretical principles, universally accepted as true.