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. For the way in which Ruskin in his Modern Painters speaks of the effect of the modern scientific concept of colours upon the ethical-religious feeling of man, shows that he deplores the lack of just what Goethe had long since achieved in his Farbenlehre where, starting with purely physical observations, he had been able to develop from them a ‘physical-moral’ theory of colour.