began the attack, long ago, on the other side, by telling us there was
no such thing as light at all, unless we choose to see it.2 Now, German
and English, both, have reversed their engines, and insist that light
would be exactly the same light that it is, though nobody could ever
see it. The fact being that the force must be there, and the eye there,
and 'light' means the effect of the one on the other - and perhaps,
also - (Plato saw farther into that mystery than anyone has since, that
I know of) - on something a little way within the eyes.'

Remarks like these, and the further quotation given below, make it seem
particularly tragic that Ruskin apparently had no knowledge of Goethe's
Farbenlehre. This is the more remarkable in view of the significance
which Turner, with whom Ruskin stood in such close connexion, ascribed
to it from the standpoint of the artist. For the way in which Ruskin in
his Modern Painters speaks of the effect of the modern scientific
concept of colours upon the ethical-religious feeling of man, shows
that he deplores the lack of just what Goethe had long since achieved
in his Farbenlehre where, starting with purely physical observations,
he had been able to develop from them a 'physical-moral' theory of
colour.

Ruskin's alertness to the effect on ethical life of a scientific
world-picture empty of all qualitative values led him to write:

'It is in raising us from the first state of inactive reverie to the
second of useful thought, that scientific pursuits are to be chiefly
praised. But in restraining us at this second stage, and checking the
impulses towards higher contemplation, they are to be feared or blamed.
They may in certain minds be consistent with such contemplation, but
only by an effort; in their nature they are always adverse to it,