DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

The Innocent Illusion

Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness
By Nicholas Humphrey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 160 pp. Cloth, $19.95.

The cover of the 2006 Harvard University edition of Seeing Red shows a handsomely horned bull within inches of a matador who is holding a red cape, which, no doubt, will be whisked away just as the charging bull lunges forward. We can only imagine the experience of the bull who, fully expecting to contact something substantial and red, finds itself thrusting those horns into thin, uncolored air. Similarly, one can imaging the experience of a typical reader who picks up Humphrey's book expecting to sink intellectual horns into a substantial cape of perceptual redness. But like the skillful matador, our artful author whisks the narrative cape away, leaving the reader to ponder only thin, uncolored perceptual air. The analogy to the experience of the bull is not hyperbole. The perception of the color red is, as Humphrey tells us, like nothing at all.