Literacy orchestrated the senses under a single conductor: sight. It enthroned sight to the point where it alone was trusted. All truth was expected to conform to observed experience.

Aristotle, in the first sentence of Metaphysics, says, "Of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight." Plato tells us there is a hierarchy of senses, with sight at the top, touch at the bottom.

Sight became supreme & all other senses became subservient to it. Literate man said, "Seeing is believing"; "Believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear"; "I'm from Missouri - show me." For him, the observable object or act was the reality: truth was determined by reference to it.

He replaced mythology with history & sent biblical scholars off to the Holy Land to dig up Noah's ark & the walls of Jericho. His art imitated nature, that is, optical reality: people expected artists to paint what they saw. They agreed with Winston Churchill who said, "When I paint a cow, I want it to look like a cow."

Dreams were dismissed until Freud announced they were really historical accounts concealed in secret code. Court evidence was largely direct evidence, preferably the eye-witness account: this was considered "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Written music became increasingly linear & narrative. Even early mathematics, with certain notable exceptions, was anchored in material experience. Above all, early science was descriptive & classificatory: it dealt with the observable & measurable, and therefore was regarded as the most refined method for determining truth. Literate languages stressed the world of observable surfaces. The eye of the reader scanned life as well as print.