Note 177 — Chapter IV · THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY (continued 2)

Goethe’s theory of colour openly controverted Newton’s theory of light. A long account of the controversy will be found in Chapter IX of G. H. Lewes’s Life of Goethe—a work that, taken all in all, is one of the wisest biographies ever written. In reading his critique of Goethe’s theory, of course, it has to be borne in mind that he wrote before the modern development of the electro-magnetic theory, which has substituted a merely mathematical existence for the Newtonian physical existence of colour-rays as such in white light. Now, this physical existence was just what, in substance, Goethe denied. What he affirmed, in the simpler language of his day, was that white light was something simple and colourless that becomes coloured through diminutions or modifications imposed upon it by “darkness.” The modern physicist, using a subtler hypothesis than Newton’s and a more refined “balance” than that which Lewes reproaches Goethe for “flinging away,” has found in white light, not the Newtonian mixture of colour-rays, but a surge of irregular wave-trains which are only regularized into colour-vibrations through being acted upon by analysers of one sort and another, from prisms to particulate matter. This necessity of a counter-agent for the production of colour seems—to a critical outsider at any rate—very like the necessity of an efficient negative principle or “opaque” that Goethe’s intuitive interpretation of his experiments led him to postulate. It is this that is the heart of the theory, and not the “simplicity” of light per se.

So much it seems desirable to add to the text and the reference, in order to expand the author’s statement that “both were right.” For Lewes, with all his sympathetic penetration of the man and real appreciation of his scientific achievement, feels obliged to regard his methods and his theory as such as “erroneous.” And it is perhaps not out of place in this book to adduce an instance of the peculiar nature and power of intuitive vision (which entirely escapes direct description) in which Vision frankly challenges Reason on its own ground, meets with refutation (or contempt) from the Reason of its day, and yet may come to be upheld in its specific rightness (its rightness as vision, that is, apart from its technical enunciation by the seer) by the Reason of a later day.—Tr.