The perception process involves two phases: the recognition of sensory information and the interpretation of sensory information. For truth to be perceived, or, in other words, for something to be perceived accurately, sensory information must be correctly recognized or identified and then interpreted faithfully according to that recognition. A faithful interpretation is one that does not deny the recognition of sensory information. The truth is not perceived if an inaccurate recognition is faithfully interpreted. An interpretation can, however, take different forms and the truth can still be perceived, if the recognition is accurate and if the interpretation does not deny that recognition. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In Part One, Chapter Eighteen of Cervantes' Don Quixote, when the title character enters battle with a flock of sheep, his perception of the sheep is initially influenced by expectations. In this case the mode of perception is sight; vision is the sensory information that Don Quixote must recognize and interpret. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho cannot see the sheep at first because of the "clouds of dust that [the sheep] raised, which obscured and blinded their [Don Quixote and Sancho's] vision" (Cervantes 135). Before he can actually perceive the approach of the hordes, Don Quixote expects them to be enemy armies ready to clash in battle, because, as the narrator explains, "every hour and every minute his mind was always full of those battles, spells, adventures, miracles, loves and challenges that are told in books of chivalry" (Cervantes 135). In other words, Don Quixote's madness, caused by literature, leads him to expect these approaching hordes to be armies. Yet even after being able to see the hordes of sheep, he still believes they are armies. As the herds approach, Sancho shouts to Don Quixote, who vows to defeat one of the "armies," "Turn back, Don Quixote, for I swear to God, sir, it is rams and sheep you will attack. Turn. Back!" (Cervantes 137). Don Quixote, however, ignores his squire's warning and attacks the sheep as if they were an enemy army. At this point in the adventure Don Quixote mistakenly recognizes the sheep as warriors and interprets them as such. The first stage of his perception is inaccurate, he does not perceive the truth, but the second stage is accurate. He faithfully interprets his vision according to his recognition, but because the first stage of perception is imprecise, he does not perceive the truth. The knight's perception, however, changes after the battle, when Sancho tells him, once again, "Did I not tell you, Don Quixote, sir, to turn back, for it was not armies you would attack, but flocks of sheep?" (Cervantes 138). This is where Don Quixote acknowledges the truth and acknowledges that the hordes were, in fact, sheep. However, he interprets his recognition unfaithfully, because he goes on to state that "an enchanter... transformed the hostile squadrons into flocks of sheep" (Cervantes 139). Such an interpretation denies proper recognition and is therefore unfaithful. In this way, the perception of Don Quixote changes from an inaccurate recognition and a faithful interpretation to an accurate recognition and an unfaithful interpretation. He changes his perception to accommodate Sancho's objection. Another example that illustrates Don Quixote's misperception of truth is the famous adventure with the windmills. On this occasion, unlike the battle with the sheep, in which a cloud ofdust initially blocks his sight, Don Quixote sees and perceives windmills from the beginning, but still cannot perceive the truth. He says, “Look yonder, friend Sancho Panza, where more than thirty monstrous giants appear” (Cervantes 68). Don Quixote's command to "look" and his insistence that the giants "appear" must mean that he can see them. He mistakenly recognizes the sight of windmills as giants and faithfully interprets them as such. As in the case of the adventure of the sheep, when, after the battle, Sancho tells Don Quixote that his perception was wrong, Don Quixote's perception changes from inaccurate recognition and faithful interpretation to accurate recognition and unfaithful interpretation. Sancho says, "Didn't I tell Your Excellency to look at what you were doing, because they were just windmills?" (Cervantes 69). Once again, Don Quixote states that an enchanter, the “wise Friston…turned those giants into windmills” (Cervantes 69). The character Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse also perceives the elements of the world differently than other characters. Like Don Quixote, Lily's mode of perception is vision. Unlike Don Quixote, whose recognition of the truth changes in the sheep scene, Lily's recognition of the truth that, for example, Mrs. Ramsay is Mrs. Ramsay, remains constant. Furthermore, unlike Don Quixote, whose interpretation takes the form of words, as in his long enumeration of the "knights" in the approaching "armies", and action, as in his attack on the sheep, the interpretation of Lily takes on the forms of thought and representation in painting. Lily attempts, with little success, to perceive, and therefore to understand, Mrs. Ramsay in all her complexity as a woman and as a human being. He uses the language of “seeing” or “vision” to express his frustration with such a daunting task: “Fifty pairs of eyes weren't enough to get around that woman, he thought” (Woolf 198). The interpretation of such attempts to perceive the totality of people takes the form of thinking. Lily's main form of interpretation, however, is represented in her painting. The scene that Lily paints from the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides includes Mrs. Ramsay reading to James. Lily recognizes that Mrs. Ramsay's form is, in fact, Mrs. Ramsay. He distorts his interpretation in the painting by representing Mrs. Ramsay and James as a purple triangle. It cannot be said, as in the case of Don Quixote, that because his performance represents Mrs. Ramsay differently from how she sees her, Lily does not perceive the truth. There is a crucial difference in the interpretations of these characters. Don Quixote's belief, for example, that an enchanter has turned armies into sheep belies his recognition. While he recognizes the truth that the hordes appear like sheep, his interpretation that they are, in fact, warriors negates his recognition. Lily's artistic interpretation of Mrs. Ramsay as a triangle does not negate her recognition of Mrs. Ramsay as herself. Lily doesn't think that Mrs. Ramsay and James are actually a purple triangle. He tells Mr. Bankes that he had “made no attempt at resemblance” (Woolf 52) in representing Mrs. Ramsay and James as a triangular shape. The self-consciousness of Lily's performance, her deliberate modification of perception, marks another crucial difference between her and her. and Don Quixote: that Lily actively changes her vision to represent truth, while Don Quixote changes his vision to represent fantasy. Although Cervantes does not offer the reader such a broad vision of the..