(pfirsichblüt), or 'purple' (as being nearest to the dye-stuff so called
by the ancients after the mollusc from which it was obtained).10

It needs only a glance through the prism into the sunlit world to make
one convinced of the natural appearing of this delicate and at the same
time powerfully luminous colour. For a narrow dark object on a light
field is a much commoner occurrence in nature than the enclosing by two
broad objects of a narrow space of light, the condition necessary for
the emergence of a continuous colour-band with green in the middle. In
fact, the spectrum which science since the time of Newton regards as
the only one, appears much more rarely among natural conditions than
does Goethe's counter-spectrum.

With the peach-blossom a fresh proof is supplied that what man
experiences in his soul is in harmony with the objective facts of
nature. As with green, we experience peach-blossom as a colour that
leaves us in equilibrium. With peach-blossom, however, the equilibrium
is of a different kind, owing to the fact that it arises from the union
of the colour-poles, not at their original stage but in their
'heightened' form. And so green, the colour of the plant-world harmony
given by nature, stands over against 'purple', the colour of the human
being striving towards harmony. By virtue of this quality, purple
served from antiquity for the vesture of those who have reached the
highest stage of human development for their time. This characteristic
of the middle colours of the two spectra was expressed by Goethe when
he called green 'real totality', and peach-blossom 'ideal totality'.

From this standpoint Goethe was able to smile at the Newtonians. He
could say that if they persisted in asserting that the colourless,
so-called 'white' light is composed of the seven colours of the