Importance For Vision
Looking at one's surrounding environment, the vast majority of visible objects are seen primarily by diffuse reflection from their surface. This holds with few exceptions, such as glass, reflective liquids, polished or smooth metals, glossy objects, and objects that themselves emit light: the Sun, lamps, and computer screens (which, however, emit diffuse light). Outdoors it is the same, with perhaps the exception of a transparent water stream or of the iridescent colors of a beetle. Additionally, Rayleigh scattering is responsible for the blue color of the sky, and Mie scattering for the white color of the water droplets of clouds.
Light scattered from the surfaces of objects is by far the primary light which humans visually observe.
Read more about this topic: Diffuse Reflection
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)