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nydus/Goethe's Theory of ColoursPublic

This volume presents an English translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s treatise on the nature and perception of color. The work includes a collection of systematic observations and experiments alongside the author’s theoretical challenges to Newtonian optics.

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Table of Contents

GOETHE'S

carried over a dark surface, the dark edges over a light surface, the figure over its boundary, the boundary over the figure. But if the rectilinear boundaries of a figure could be indefinitely extended by refraction, so that figure and background might only pursue their course next, but not over each other, no colour would appear, not even if they were prolonged to infinity.

XIV.
CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH THE APPEARANCE OF COLOUR INCREASES.

209.

We have seen in the foregoing experiments that all appearance of colour occasioned by refraction depends on the condition that the boundary or edge be moved in upon the object itself, or the object itself over the ground, that the figure should be, as it were, carried over itself, or over the ground. And we shall now find that, by increased displacement

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