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 75 of 553
Table of Contents

GOETHE'S

the waves with reference to the eye produces the same effect. Objects seen through an opening in a red or green curtain appear to wear the opposite hue. These appearances will present themselves to the attentive observer on all occasions, even to an unpleasant degree.

58.

Having made ourselves acquainted with the simultaneous exhibition of these effects in direct cases, we shall find that we can also observe them by indirect means. If we place a piece of paper of a bright orange colour on the white surface, we shall, after looking intently at it, scarcely perceive the compensatory colour on the rest of the surface: but when we take the orange paper away, and when the blue spectrum appears in its place, immediately as this spectrum becomes fully apparent, the rest of the surface will be overspread, as if by a flash, with a reddish-yellow light, thus exhibiting to the spectator in a lively manner the productive energy of the organ, in constant conformity with the same law.

59.

As the compensatory colours easily appear, where they do not exist in nature, near and after the original opposite ones, so they are rendered more intense where they happen to mix with a similar real hue. In a court which was paved with grey limestone flags, between which grass had grown, the grass appeared of an extremely beautiful green when the evening clouds threw a scarcely perceptible reddish light on the pavement. In an opposite case we find, in walking through meadows, where we see scarcely anything but

75