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. For in dealing with optics, physical science turns at once to phenomena of light found outside man – in fact to phenomena in that physical realm from which, as the lowest of the kingdoms of nature, the observations of natural science are bound to start. Along this path one is driven, as we have seen, to conceive of light as a mere ‘disturbance’ in the universe, a kind of irregular chaos.