Theory of Colours

Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre in German) was a work published by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810. In the 1780's a number of statements as to the way colours arise came to Goethe's notice. Of the prismatic phenomena, it was commonly held that when you let colourless light go through a prism the colourless light is split up. For in such way the phenomena are interpreted.

Light and Dark Spectrums

The spectrum, therefore, is a compound phenomenon. In the familiar prisimatic

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experiment, you get colour at the edges, and where the red-yellow and

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blue-violet edges meet, you get green.

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Because the colour phenomenon rely on the adjacency of light and dark, there are

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therefore two ways to produce a spectrum -- with a light beam surrounded by dark, and with a dark beam surrounded by light, as illustrated below.

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