makes white light seem something that in reality it is not. For the
truth to become apparent, the natural function of the eye must be
reduced by fatigue. To believe that a body, functioning in this way, is
the creation of God, and at the same time to look on this God as a
Being of absolute moral perfection, would seem a complete contradiction
to the Hans Andersen child. In this contradiction and others of the
same kind to which nowadays every child is exposed repeatedly and
willy-nilly in school lessons and so on - we must seek the true cause
of the moral uncertainty so characteristic of young people today. It
was because Ruskin felt this that he called for a 'moral' theory of
light.

Since Goethe did not judge man from artificially devised experiments,
but the latter from man, quite simple reflexions led him to the
following view of the presence of the contrasting colour in the
coloured after-images. Nature outside man had taught him that life on
all levels takes it course in a perpetual interplay of opposites,
manifested externally in an interplay of diastole and systole
comparable to the process of breathing. He, therefore, traced the
interchange of light-values in colourless after-images to a 'silent
resistance which every vital principle is forced to exhibit when some
definite condition is presented to it. Thus, inhalation presupposes
exhalation; thus every systole, its diastole. When darkness is
presented to the eye, the eye demands brightness, and vice versa: it
reveals its vital energy, its fitness to grasp the object, precisely by
bringing forth out of itself something contrary to the object.'

Consequently he summarizes his reflexions on coloured afterimages and
their reversals of colour in these words: 'The eye demands actual
completeness and closes the colour-circle in itself.' How true this is,