order to trace the cause of the Newtonian error was to go through Book
I of Newton's Optics, sentence by sentence, recapitulate Newton's
experiments and rearrange them in the order which seemed to him
essential. In so doing he gained an insight which was fundamental for
all future work, and often proved very beneficial in the perfecting of
his own methods. His examination of the Newtonian procedure showed him
that the whole mistake rested on the fact that 'a complicated
phenomenon should have been taken as a basis, and the simpler explained
from the complex'. Nevertheless, it still needed 'much time and
application in order to wander through all the labyrinths with which
Newton had been pleased to confuse his successors'.

*

It seems a small thing, and yet it is a great one, which Goethe, as the
above description shows, discovered almost by chance. This is shown by
the conclusions to which he was led in the systematic prosecutions of
his discovery. An account of them is given in his Beiträge zur Optik,6
published in 1791, the year in which Galvani came before the public
with his observations in the sphere of electricity.

Goethe describes in this book the basic phenomena of the creation of
the prismatic colours, with particulars of a number of experiments so
arranged that the truth he had discovered, contrary to Newton's view,
comes to light through the very phenomena themselves. Only much later,
in the year 1810, and after he had brought to a certain conclusion four
years previously the researches which he had pursued most carefully the
whole time, did he make public the actual masterpiece, Entwurf einer
Farbenlehre.7 (An English translation of the didactic part appeared
about ten years after Goethe's death.)