Brewster’s treatise on the kaleidoscope carefully delineates the formal qualities of nature and art:

All the various forms which nature and art present to us, may be divided into two classes, namely simple or irregular forms, and compound or regular forms. To the first class belong all those forms which are called picturesque, and which cannot be reduced to two forms similar with regard to a given point; and to the second class belong the forms of the animals, and the forms of regular architectural buildings, the forms of most articles of furniture and ornament, the forms of many natural productions, and all forms, in short, which are composed of two forms, similar and similarly situated with regard to a given line or plane. (16)

The choice of terms here—regular and irregular, complex and simple—mark a different sort of binary. Batchen later notes the desire of William Gilpin, an early advocate of the picturesque, to “fix” the images reflected in his Claude glass (a concave mirror used for viewing landscapes). However, he does not remark on the fact that these desires to fix “time” in terms of “space” are related not to reality, but rather to virtual visions created by optical devices. Brewster’s aim was to transform the simple into the complex, and the irregular picturesque reality into a naturalized regularity through the mirrored chambers of the kaleidoscope.

However, in making this distinction I am traveling a well-worn path. I’ve read it a thousand times, but it often escapes my notice. Patrick Maynard spells it out succinctly :

With some exceptions, such a survey of reputable “philosophical” opinions shows a tendency to consider photography in terms of its products, photographs, and then to consider some significant relationship that these products bear to some other thing or things and thereby to discover the meaning all this has for us. These other things are, typically, what the photos are photographs of, or—in the case of the more “philosophical” accounts—what is called “reality” or “the real,” “the world,” “the real world,” and so on. In other words, we find an all too familiar syndrome of theoretical puzzlement. It begins with “reification,” the conception of a topic in terms of substantives, “things”— in fact, two kinds of things and thus a “dualism,” to boot: on one side there is the photograph (click); and on the other, “reality” (THUD). Next comes “essentialism,” a search for the essences (drawn from the impressions of a few instances) of one or the other member of this pair of things, as well as for an essential relationship between them, form which perceptions are to flow. (The Engine of Visualization 14-15)

Batchen’s arc is from the process of photography to the transformation of space and time evoked by its products. He does so without really addressing the problem of “realism” or “the real world.” Photography is “reified” not as the transformer of the real, but rather as the embodiment of modern philosophy. In a profound sense, I think the same transformation could be suggested of the kaleidoscope in the classical episteme. It fulfils a desire for the creation of symmetry even in the most “wild” picturesque scene. It transforms the irregular into the regular, the simple into the complex—but then, this is of course an attempt to define the “essence” of the kaleidoscope.