We explain this curious contradiction in the following way. When someone makes an inspired speech and affects the psyche of his listeners, then the speaker has formed his listeners to resemble himself to a certain extent. And as each listener went through a process in which the speaker and his line of thought became like him, it was the speaker who was assimilated. And even if, as in hypnosis, the attention of the listener should be entirely passive, it would still be he, the listener, who is assimilated. In the same way, the sight and contemplation of a natural scene exercises an influence upon the psyche of the viewer.
Colorful beams excite the brain and transform themselves into psychic energies, into memory traces.
It is therefore the natural scene that influenced him, that formed his psyche, and that assimilated him to its image. But it was also he, the onlooker, who absorbed an amount of nature's beams and who made them his owns assimilated them. A sculptor works on a stone. He molds the stone according to his inner vision. The stone adapts itself to the shape which had previously lived within the sculptor.