blindness - that is, not to be led by day-time experience to forget the
night-side of human life. The passage quoted from the Introduction to
his Farbenlehre shows how, in all that he strove for, he kept this goal
in view.

How inevitably a way of thinking that seeks an intuitive understanding
of nature is led to views like those of Goethe is shown by the
following quotations from Reid and Ruskin, expressing their view of the
relationship between the eye, or the act of seeing, and external
optical phenomena. In his Inquiry, at the beginning of his review of
visual perceptions, Reid says:

'The structure of the eye, and of all its appurtenances, the admirable
contrivances of nature for performing all its various external and
internal motions and the variety in the eyes of different animals,
suited to their several natures and ways of life, clearly demonstrate
this organ to be a masterpiece of nature's work. And he must be very
ignorant of what hath been discovered about it, or have a very strange
cast of understanding, who can seriously doubt, whether or not the rays
of light and the eye were made for one another with consummate wisdom,
and perfect skill in optics.''3

The following passage from Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (Lecture X)
brings out his criticism of the scientific way of treating of optical
phenomena:

'With regard to the most interesting of all their [the philosophers']
modes of force-light; they never consider how far the existence of it
depends on the putting of certain vitreous and nervous substances into
the formal arrangement which we call an eye. The German philosophers