The colours in the eye feather

The colours in the peacock tail are particularly beautiful because they are bright and
iridescent. An iridescent colour is a colour that changes with the angle of view. The
colours are not produced by pigments but by an optical effect called thin-film
interference that takes place in the barbules.4 In technical terms, the peacock has
‘structural colours’.

In the eye pattern, the barbules appear bronze, blue, dark purple and green. Away
from the eye region, the barbules are uniformly green. The colours in the eye
feather can only be seen on the front surface of the feather because this is where
the barbules are positioned. The back of the feather is uniformly brown because the
barbs contain a brown pigment. 

The eye pattern: The particular beauty of the eye pattern comes from the
rounded shapes that have a high degree of resolution. The ‘pupil’ of the eye is
formed by a dark purple cardioid and the ‘iris’ is formed by a blue ellipsoid. These
shapes are located within a pointed bronze ellipsoid that is surrounded by one or
two green fringes. A very important feature of the eye pattern is that it is a digital
pattern which is formed by the combined effect of many thousands of individual
barbules. Some patterns in nature are formed by natural growth mechanisms, as
with the spiral shape of the nautilus shell. However, the eye pattern in the peacock
tail requires the precise coordination of independent barbs and this cannot be
achieved by a simple growth mechanism. Barbules on adjacent barbs coordinate
perfectly with each other to produce the eye pattern.

The peafowl are forest birds that nest on the ground but roost in trees. They are terrestrial feeders.

In Hinduism, the Peacock is associated with Saraswati, a deity representing benevolence, patience,

kindness, compassion and knowledge. Similar to Saraswati, the Peacock is associated with Kwan-yin in
Asian spirituality. Kwan-yin (or Quan Yin) is also an emblem of love, compassionate watchfulness, good-
will, nurturing, and kind-heartedness. Legend tells us she chose to remain a mortal even though she
could be immortal because she wished to stay behind and aid humanity in their spiritual evolution.

No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our
existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending.
So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle,
Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion,
conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering
bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is
that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists
tended to neglect them—perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered
by the word “emotion” and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In
recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous
interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of
the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different
stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from
the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology, evolutionary
biology, and even economics. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those
approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their
philosophical importance.

Basic
Basic opposite
emotion

Joy Sadness

Trust Disgust

Fear Anger

Surprise Anticipation

Sadness Joy
Disgust Trust

Anger Fear

Anticipation Surprise

Human Feelings (The results of

Feelings Opposite
Emotions.)

Disappointmen
Optimism Anticipation + Joy
t

Love Joy + Trust Remorse

Submission Trust + Fear Contempt

Awe Fear + Surprise Aggressiveness

Disappointment Surprise + Sadness Optimism

Remorse Sadness + Disgust Love

Contempt Disgust + Anger Submission

Anger + Anticipatio
Aggressiveness Awe
n

The Indian Peafowl or Blue Peafowl (Pavo cristatus) is a large and brightly

coloured bird of the pheasant family native to South Asia, but introduced and semi-feral in many other
parts of the world. The male, peacock, is predominantly blue with a fan-like crest of spatula-tipped wire-
like feathers and is best known for the long train made up of elongated upper-tail covert feathers which
bear colourful eyespots. These stiff and elongated feathers are raised into a fan and quivered in a display