“Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. . . . Our sight . . . may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies. . . . We cannot indeed have a single image in the fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight.”

—Joseph Addison, quoted by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse, 1946.