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Both the diminishing of spatial extension and the breaking up of a whole into parts entail an increase in the quality ‘dry’. This applies not only in the sense that the parts which have become independent units are ‘dry’ in relation to each other – formerly coherent matter being turned into dust – but also in the other sense, and one valid in both cases, that levity and gravity are losing part of their previous inter-connexion. If this twofold process of ‘becoming dry’ reaches a certain intensity, the substances concerned, provided they are inflammable, begin to burn, with the result that dry heat escapes and dry ash is formed. We note that in each case we are dealing with a change in the relationship between the poles of a polarity of the first order.

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‘As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time as myself; poets more excellent have lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.’

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In these words spoken to his secretary, Eckermann, in 1829, a few years before his death, Goethe gave his opinion on the significance of his scientific researches in the field of optical phenomena. He knew that the path he had opened up had led him to truths which belong to the original truths of mankind. He expressed this by remarking that his theory of colour was ‘as old as the world’.

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If in this book we come somewhat late to a discussion of Goethe’s colour-theory, in spite of the part it played in his own scientific work, and in spite of its significance for the founding of a physics based on his method, the reasons are these. When Goethe undertook his studies in this field he had not to reckon with the forms of thought which have become customary since the development of mechanistic and above all – to put it concisely – of ‘electricalistic’ thinking. Before a hearing can be gained in our age for a physics of Light and Colour as conceived by Goethe, certain hindrances must first be cleared away. So a picture on the one hand of matter, and on the other of electricity, such as is given when they are studied by Goethean methods, had first to be built up; only then is the ground provided for an unprejudiced judgment of Goethe’s observations and the deductions that can be made from them to-day.

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As Professor Heisenberg, in his lecture quoted earlier (Chapter II), rightly remarks, Goethe strove directly with Newton only in the realms of colour-theory and optics. Nevertheless his campaign was not merely against Newton’s opinions in this field. He was guided throughout by the conviction that the fundamental principles of the whole Newtonian outlook were at stake. It was for this reason that his polemics against Newton were so strongly expressed, although he had no fondness for such controversies. 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.’

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The reason why Goethe chose optics as the field of conflict, and devoted to it more than twenty years of research and reflexion, amidst all the other labours of his rich life, lay certainly in his individual temperament – ‘zum Sehen geboren, zum Schauen bestellt‘.¹ At the same time one must see here a definite guidance of humanity. Since the hour had struck for mankind to take the first step towards overcoming the world-conception of the one-eyed, colour-blind onlooker, what step could have been more appropriate than this of Goethe’s, when he raised the eye’s capacity for seeing colours to the rank of an instrument of scientific cognition?

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In point of fact, the essential difference between Goethe’s theory of colour and the theory which has prevailed in science (despite all modifications) since Newton’s day, lies in this: While the theory of Newton and his successors was based on excluding the colour-seeing faculty of the eye, Goethe founded his theory on the eye’s experience of colour.

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In view of the present scientific conception of the effect which a prismatic piece of a transparent medium has on light passing through it, Goethe’s objection to Newton’s interpretation and the conclusions drawn from it seems by no means as heretical as it did in Goethe’s own time and for a hundred years afterwards. For, as Lord Rayleigh and others have shown, the facts responsible for the coming into being of the spectral colours, when these are produced by a diffraction grating, invalidate Newton’s idea that the optical apparatus serves to reveal colours which are inherent in the original light. Today it is known that these colours are an outcome of the interference of the apparatus (whether prism or grating) with the light. Thus we find Professor R. W. Wood, in the opening chapter of his Physical Optics, after having described the historical significance of Newton’s conception of the relation between light and colour, saying: ‘Curiously enough, this discovery, which we are taking as marking the beginning of a definite knowledge about light, is one which we shall demolish in the last chapter of this book,² for our present ideas regarding the action of the prism more nearly resemble the idea held previous to Newton’s classical experiments. We now believe that the prism actually manufactures the coloured light.’

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We find ourselves faced here with an instance of the problem, ‘Discovery or Manufacture?’ dealt with by Eddington in the manner described in our previous chapter. This very instance is indeed used by Eddington himself as a case in which the answer is definitely in favour of ‘manufacture’. Nevertheless, Eddington complains, experts, in spite of knowing better, keep to the traditional way of speaking about the spectral colours as being originally contained in the light. ‘Such is the glamour of a historical experiment.’³ It is for the same reason that Goethe’s discovery continues to be unrecognized by the majority of scientists, who prefer, instead of examining the question for themselves, to join in the traditional assertion that ‘Goethe never understood Newton’.