In the preface to the book, Huxley describes how, at the age of sixteen, he had a violent attack of keratitis punctata which made him almost totally blind for eighteen months, and left him thereafter with severely impaired sight.

He found this immensely helpful, and in 1942 wrote “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 learned the art of seeing”.

My purpose in making this correlation is to demonstrate the essential reasonableness of a method, which turns out to be nothing more or less than the practical application to the problems of vision of certain theoretical principles, universally accepted as true.

According to Huxley, the prevailing medical view is that ...the organs of vision are incapable of curing themselves … then the eyes must be totally different in kind from other parts of the body.

… At the present time it is rejected only by those who have personal reasons for knowing it to be untrue … It is therefore no longer possible for me to accept the currently orthodox theory, with its hopelessly pessimistic practical consequences.He goes on to analyse the whole process of visual perception, using ideas and vocabulary taken from the philosopher C. D. Broad.

But whereas these are in general transitory, glasses, if worn, are to a fixed prescription.It will thus be seen that the wearing of spectacles confines the eyes to a state of rigid and unvarying structural immobility.

Mal-functioning and strain tend to appear whenever the conscious "I" interferes with instinctively acquired habits of proper use, either by trying too hard to do well, or by feeling unduly anxious about possible mistakes..

But in seeing, as in all other psycho-physical skills, the anxious effort to do well defeats its own object; for this anxiety produces psychological and physiological strains, and strain is incompatible with the proper means for achieving our end, namely normal and natural functioning.Right at the end of the book there is a mention of F. M. Alexander, whose Alexander technique for posture is perhaps analogous to that of Bates for eyes.

And every ophthalmologist equally knows that his consulting-room has long been haunted by people whom they have not helped at all.He concluded by saying, For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley's antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Coué-ism.

[2][3]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’.

"[4] New York optometrist Philip Pollack commented: Huxley sounds in his book like Bates out of Oxford with a major in psychology and metaphysics.