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Goethe’s Theory of Colours

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

37 of 122 · Contents · Download EPUB

XXVI Grey Objects

341 (218).

We have exhibited grey objects as very important to our inquiry in the subjective experiments. They show, by the faintness of the accessory images, that these same images are in all cases derived from the principal object. If we wish here, too, to carry on the objective experiments parallel with the others, we may conveniently do this by placing a more or less dull ground glass before the opening through which the sun’s image enters. By this means a subdued image would be produced, which on being refracted would exhibit much duller colours on the recipient plane than those immediately derived from the sun’s disk; and thus, even from the intense sun-image, only a faint accessory image would appear, proportioned to the mitigation of the light by the glass. This experiment, it is true, will only again and again confirm what is already sufficiently familiar to us.

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