Since Goethe did not judge man from artificially devised experiments, but the latter from man, quite simple reflexions led him to the following view of the presence of the contrasting colour in the coloured after-images. Nature outside man had taught him that life on all levels takes it course in a perpetual interplay of opposites, manifested externally in an interplay of diastole and systole comparable to the process of breathing. He, therefore, traced the interchange of light-values in colourless after-images to a ‘silent resistance which every vital principle is forced to exhibit when some definite condition is presented to it. Thus, inhalation presupposes exhalation; thus every systole, its diastole. When darkness is presented to the eye, the eye demands brightness, and vice versa: it reveals its vital energy, its fitness to grasp the object, precisely by bringing forth out of itself something contrary to the object.’