The theory of color as proposed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). In addition to being an eminent German playwright and poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Goethe also made contributions to science. One of these was an attempt to overthrow the orthodox Newtonian account of how normal white light is actually compounded out of the color rays of the spectrum. Using a prism and seeing rainbow hues only at the edges of objects, Goethe concluded that Sir Isaac Newton’s theory, as he vaguely remembered it, was wrong. Newton had been torturing that holy thing “Light,” he had been “putting Nature on the rack.”
Newton, he went on to argue, had been misled by the excessive abstraction of mathematical forms of thinking. His own theory, following Aristotle, assumed the primacy of natural human sensation, as in the doctrine that white is a simple sensation and cannot be compounded out of colors. Goethe claimed that colors are produced by the interaction of light and dark, as dark mountains appear blue in the distance when seen through stray white light in the air and as the setting sun appears red when seen through the relatively dark sky. Goethe’s powers of literary expression gained him many followers, but Newtonian scientists regarded this as a good example of the self-delusion of an individual made too self-confident by the popularity of his literary works and who would have benefited from a judicious guide.