CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
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.

Page 63 of 553
Table of Contents

GOETHE'S

change from dark to light, and from light to dark. The eye cannot for a moment remain in a particular state determined by the object it looks upon. On the contrary, it is forced to a sort of opposition, which, in contrasting extreme with extreme, intermediate degree with intermediate degree, at the same time combines these opposite impressions, and thus ever tends to a whole, whether the impressions are successive, or simultaneous and confined to one image.

34.

Perhaps the peculiarly grateful sensation which we experience in looking at the skilfully treated chiaro-scuro of colourless pictures and similar works of art arises chiefly from the simultaneous impression of a whole, which by the organ itself is sought, rather than arrived at, in succession, and which, whatever may be the

63