In this chapter the experiencing of the various colours and their
interplay through the human soul is treated in many aspects, and Goethe
is able to show that what arises in man's consciousness as qualitative
colour-experience is nothing but a direct 'becoming-inward' of what is
manifested to the 'reader's' eye and mind as the objective nature of
colours. So, in one realm of the sense-world, Goethe succeeded in
closing the abyss which divides existence and consciousness, so long as
the latter is restricted to a mere onlooker-relationship towards the
sense-world.

If we ask what induced Goethe to treat the physiological colours before
the physical colours, thus deviating so radically from the order
customary in science, we shall find the answer in a passage from the
Introduction to his Entwurf. Goethe, in giving his views on the
connexion between light and the eye, says: 'The eye owes its existence
to light. Out of indifferent auxiliary animal organs the light calls
forth an organ for itself, similar to its own nature; thus the eye is
formed by the light, for the light, so that the inner light can meet
the outer.' In a verse, which reproduces in poetic form a thought
originally expressed by Plotinus, Goethe sums up his idea of the
creative connexion between eye and light as follows:

' Unless our eyes had something of the sun, How could we ever look upon
the light? Unless there lived within us God's own might, How could the
Godlike give us ecstasy?1

(Trans. Stawell-Dickinson)

By expressing himself in this way in the Introduction to his
Farbenlehre, Goethe makes it clear from the outset that when he speaks