ox GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 47 



sensation of light. Perhaps the relation between our senses and 

 the external world may be best enunciated as follows : our sen- 

 sations are for us only symbols of the objects of the external 

 world, and correspond to them only in some such way as written 

 characters or articulate words to the things they denote. They 

 give us, it is true, information respecting the properties of things 

 without us, but no better infonnation than we give a blind man 

 about colour by verbal descriptions. 



We see that science has arrived at an estimate of the senses 

 very different from that which was present to the poet's mind. 

 And Newton's assertion that white was composed of all the 

 colours of the spectrum was the first germ of the scientific view 

 which has subsequently been developed. For at that time there 

 were none of those galvanic observations which paved the way 

 to a knowledge of the functions of the nerves in the production 

 of sensations. Natural philosophers asserted that white, to the 

 eye the simplest and purest of all our sensations of colour, was 

 compounded of less pure and complex materials. It seems to 

 have flashed upon the poet's mind that all his principles were 

 unsettled by the results of this assertion, and that is why the 

 hypothesis seems to him so unthinkable, so ineffably absurd. 

 We must look upon his theoiy of colour as a forlorn hope, as 

 a desperate attempt to rescue from the attacks of science the 

 belief in the direct truth of our sensations. And this will ac- 

 count for the enthusiasm with which he strives to elaborate and to 

 defend his theory, for the passionate irritability with which he 

 attacks his opponent, for the overweening importance which he 

 attaches to these researches in comparison with his other achieve- 

 ments, and for his inaccessibility to conviction or compromise. 



If we now turn to Goethe's own theories on the subject, 

 we must, on the grounds above stated, expect to find that he 

 cannot, without being untrue to his own principle, give us- 

 anything deserving to be called a scientific explanation of the 

 phenomena, and that is exactly what happens. He starts with 

 the proposition that all colours are darker than white, that they 

 have something of shade in them (on the physical theory, white 

 compounded of all colours must necessarily be brighter than 



