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5 Colour as quality being no essential factor in the scientific explanation of the spectrum. 6 Contributions to Optics. 7 Outline of a Theory of Colour. 8 See Rudolf Steiner's edition of Goethe's Farbenlehre under Paralipomena zur Chromatik, No. 27. 9 Goethe's own representation of the phenomenon. 10 This is not to be confused with the meaning of 'purple' in modern English usage.
Through placing his examination of the physiological colours at the beginning of his Farbenlehre, Goethe actually took the path in scientific research to which Thomas Reid pointed in philosophy.
Goethe in his 'Farbenlehre' thus describes the fluorescence of horse-chestnut bark: 'Let a strip of fresh horse-chestnut bark be taken and clipped into a glass of water; the most perfect sky-blue will be immediately produced. Sir John Herschel first noticed and described the fluorescence of the sulphate of quinine, and showed that the light proceeded from a thin stratum of the solution adjacent to the surface where the light enters it.
And so a child in a red environment feels quietened because it experiences, though dimly, how its whole blood system is stimulated to the green production; bluish colours enliven it because it feels its blood answer with a production of light yellowish tones. From the latter phenomena we see once more the significance of Goethe's arrangement of his Farbenlehre.
Unless there lived within us God's own might, How could the Godlike give us ecstasy?1 By expressing himself in this way in the Introduction to his Farbenlehre, Goethe makes it clear from the outset that when he speaks of 'light' as the source of colour-phenomena, he has in mind an idea of light very different from that held by modern physics.
The importance which Goethe himself saw in this aspect of the optical problem is shown by the place he gave it in the didactic part of his Farbenlehre.
As Goethe relates at the conclusion of the 'historical' part of his Farbenlehre,4 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics.
Remarks like these, and the further quotation given below, make it seem particularly tragic that Ruskin apparently had no knowledge of Goethe's Farbenlehre. This is the more remarkable in view of the significance which Turner, with whom Ruskin stood in such close connexion, ascribed to it from the standpoint of the artist.
In looking back on that part of the Farbenlehre which he had himself called 'Polemical' in the title, he said to Eckermann: 'I by no means disavow my severe dissections of the Newtonian statements; it was necessary at the time and will also have its value hereafter; but at bottom all polemical action is repugnant to my nature, and I can take but little pleasure in it.
The book—the “Système de la Nature”—“seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence.” And in a work with remarkable title and contents, “Die Farbenlehre,” Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the “Mathematicians,” and to their chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new mathematical-mechanical view of nature.
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