It is characteristic of Goethe’s whole mode of procedure that he at once changed the question, ‘What is colour?’ into the question, ‘How does colour arise?’ It was equally characteristic that he did not, as Newton did, shut himself into a darkened room, so as to get hold of the colour-phenomenon by means of an artificially set-up apparatus. Instead, he turned first of all to nature, to let her give him the answer to the questions she had raised.