38 ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 



clearly state in what he conceives the insufficiency of the ex- 

 planation to consist. He merely repeats again and again that 

 it is quite absurd. And yet I cannot see how any one, whatever 

 his views about colour, can deny that the theory is perfectly 

 insistent with itself; and that if the hypothesis from which it 

 starts be granted, it explains the observed facts completely and 

 even simply. Newton himself mentions these spurious spectra 

 in several passages of his optical works, without going into 

 any special elucidation of the point, considering, of course, that 

 the explanation follows at once from, his hypothesis. And he 

 seems to have had good reason to think so; for Goethe no sooner 

 began to call the attention of his scientific friends to the pheno- 

 mena than all with one accord, as he himself tells us, met his 

 difficulties with this explanation from Newton's principles, which, 

 though not actually in his writings, instantly suggested itself to 

 every one who knew them. 



A reader who tries to realise attentively and thoroughly 

 every step in this part of the controversy is apt to experience at 

 this point an uncomfortable, almost a painful, feeling to see a man 

 of extraordinary abilities persistently declaring that there is an 

 obvious absurdity lurking in a few inferences appai-ently quite 

 clear and simple. He searches and searches, and at last unable, 

 with all his efforts, to find any such absurdity, or even the ap- 

 pearance of it, he gets into a state of mind in which his own 

 ideas are, so to speak, crystallised. But it is just this obvious, 

 flat contradiction that makes Goethe's point of view in 1792 so 

 interesting and so important. At this point he has not as yet 

 developed any theory of his own ; thei-e is nothing under dis- 

 cussion but a few easily grasped facts, as to the correctness of 

 which both pai'ties are agreed, and yet both hold distinctly 

 opposite views; neither of them even understands what his 

 opponent is driving at. On the one side are a number of phy- 

 sicists, who, by a long series of the ablest investigations, the 

 most elaborate calculations, and the most ingenious inventions, 

 have brought optics to such perfection that it, and it alone, 

 among the physical sciences, was beginning almost to rival 

 Astronomy in accuracy. Some of them have made the pheno- 



