Man or Matter Part 24

When we compare the way in which Goethe, on the one hand, and the physical scientist, on the other, have arrived at the truth that what Newton held to be 'discovery' was in actual fact 'manufacture', we find ourselves faced with another instance of a fact which we have encountered before in our study of electricity. It is the fact that a truth, which reveals itself to the spectator-scientist only as the result of a highly advanced experimental research, can be recognized through quite simple observation when this observation is carried out with the intention of letting the phenomena themselves speak for their 'theory'.

Furthermore, there is a corresponding difference in the effect the knowledge of such truth has on the human mind. In the field of electricity we saw that together with the scientist's recognition of the absolute qualities of the two polar forms of electricity a false semblance of reality was lent to the hypothesis of the atomic structure of matter. Something similar has occurred in the field of optics. Here, after having been forced to recognize the fallacy of Newton's theory, the spectator's mind has been driven to form a concept of the nature of light which is further than ever from the truth. For what then remains of light is - in Eddington's words - a 'quite irregular disturbance, with no tendency to periodicity', which means that to light is a.s.signed the quality of an undefined chaos (in the negative sense of this word) sprung from pure chance.

Moreover, as Eddington shows, the question whether the optical contrivance 'sorts out' from the chaotic light a particular periodicity, or whether it 'impresses' this on the light, becomes just 'a matter of expression'.11 So here, too, the modern investigator is driven to a resigned acknowledgment of the principle of Indeterminacy.

No such conclusions are forced upon the one who studies the spectrum phenomenon with the eyes of Goethe. Like the modern experimenter, he, too, is faced with the question 'Discovery or Manufacture?' and he, too, finds the answer to be 'Manufacture'. But to him nature can disclose herself as the real manufacturer, showing him how she goes to work in bringing about the colours, because in following Goethe he is careful to arrange his observations in such a way that they do not veil nature's deeds.

1 'To see is my dower, to look my employ.' Words of the Tower-Watcher in Faust, II, 5, through which Goethe echoes his own relation to the world.

2 The last chapter but two in the edition of 1924.

3 For the drastic and as such very enlightening way in which Eddington presents the problem, the reader is referred to Eddington's own description.

4 Konfession des Verfa.s.sers.

5 Colour as quality being no essential factor in the scientific explanation of the spectrum.

6 Contributions to Optics.

7 Outline of a Theory of Colour.

8 See Rudolf Steiner's edition of Goethe's Farbenlehre under Paralipomena zur Chromatik, No. 27.

9 Goethe's own representation of the phenomenon. (The diagram is simplified by omitting one colour on each side.)

10 This is not to be confused with the meaning of 'purple' in modern English usage.

11 This follows from the application of Fourier's Theorem, according to which every vibration of any kind is divisible into a sum of periodic partial vibrations, and therefore is regarded as compounded of these.

CHAPTER XV

Seeing as 'Deed' - I

Having made ourselves so far acquainted with the fundamentals of Goethe's approach to the outer phenomena of colour involved in the spectrum, we will leave this for a while to follow Goethe along another no less essential line of inquiry. It leads us to the study of our own process of sight, by means of which we grow aware of the optical facts in outer s.p.a.ce.

The importance which Goethe himself saw in this aspect of the optical problem is shown by the place he gave it in the didactic part of his Farbenlehre. The first three chapters, after the Introduction, are called 'Physiological Colours', 'Physical Colours', and 'Chemical Colours'. In the first chapter, Goethe summarizes a group of phenomena which science calls 'subjective' colours, since their origin is traced to events within the organ of sight. The next chapter deals with an actual physics of colour - that is, with the appearance of colours in external s.p.a.ce as a result of the refraction, diffraction and polarization of light. The third chapter treats of material colours in relation to chemical and other influences. After two chapters which need not concern us here comes the sixth and last chapter, ent.i.tled 'Physical-Moral Effect of Colour' ('Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farben'), which crowns the whole. There, for the first time in the history of modern science, a bridge is built between Physics, Aesthetics and Ethics. We remember it was with this aim in view that Goethe had embarked upon his search for the solution of the problem of colour.

In this chapter the experiencing of the various colours and their interplay through the human soul is treated in many aspects, and Goethe is able to show that what arises in man's consciousness as qualitative colour-experience is nothing but a direct 'becoming-inward' of what is manifested to the 'reader's' eye and mind as the objective nature of colours. So, in one realm of the sense-world, Goethe succeeded in closing the abyss which divides existence and consciousness, so long as the latter is restricted to a mere onlooker-relations.h.i.+p towards the sense-world.

If we ask what induced Goethe to treat the physiological colours before the physical colours, thus deviating so radically from the order customary in science, we shall find the answer in a pa.s.sage from the Introduction to his Entwurf. Goethe, in giving his views on the connexion between light and the eye, says: 'The eye owes its existence to light. Out of indifferent auxiliary animal organs the light calls forth an organ for itself, similar to its own nature; thus the eye is formed by the light, for the light, so that the inner light can meet the outer.' In a verse, which reproduces in poetic form a thought originally expressed by Plotinus, Goethe sums up his idea of the creative connexion between eye and light as follows:

' Unless our eyes had something of the sun, How could we ever look upon the light? Unless there lived within us G.o.d's own might, How could the G.o.dlike give us ecstasy?1

(Trans. Stawell-d.i.c.kinson)

By expressing himself in this way in the Introduction to his Farbenlehre, Goethe makes it clear from the outset that when he speaks of 'light' as the source of colour-phenomena, he has in mind an idea of light very different from that held by modern physics. For in dealing with optics, physical science turns at once to phenomena of light found outside man - in fact to phenomena in that physical realm from which, as the lowest of the kingdoms of nature, the observations of natural science are bound to start. Along this path one is driven, as we have seen, to conceive of light as a mere 'disturbance' in the universe, a kind of irregular chaos.

In contrast to this, Goethe sees that to gain an explanation of natural physical phenomena which will be in accord with nature, we must approach them on the path by which nature brings them into being. In the field of light this path is one which leads from light as creative agent to light as mere phenomenon. The highest form of manifestation of creative light most directly resembling its Idea is within man. It is there that light creates for itself the organ through which, as manifest light, it eventually enters into human consciousness. To Goethe it was therefore clear that a theory of light, which is to proceed in accord with nature, should begin with a study of the eye: its properties, its ways of acting when it brings us information of its deeds and sufferings in external nature.

The eye with its affinity to light comes into being in the apparently dark s.p.a.ce of the mother's womb. This points to the possession by the human organism of an 'inner' light which first forms the eye from within, in order that it may afterwards meet the light outside. It is this inner light that Goethe makes the starting-point of his investigations, and it is for this reason that he treats physiological colours before physical colours.

Of fundamental significance as regards method is the way in which Goethe goes on from the pa.s.sage quoted above to speak of the activity of the inner light: 'This immediate affinity between light and the eye will be denied by none; to consider them identical in substance is less easy to comprehend. It will be more intelligible to a.s.sert that a dormant light resides in the eye, and that this light can be excited by the slightest cause from within or from without. In darkness we can, by an effort of imagination, call up the brightest images; in dreams, objects appear to us as in broad daylight; if we are awake, the slightest external action of light is perceptible, and if the organ suffers a mechanical impact light and colours spring forth.'

What Goethe does here is nothing less than to follow the development of sight to where it has its true origin. Let us remember that a general source of illusion in the modern scientific picture of the world lies in the fact that the onlooker-consciousness accepts itself as a self-contained ready-made ent.i.ty, instead of tracing itself genetically to the states of consciousness from which it has developed in the course of evolution. In reality, the consciousness kindled by outer sense-perception was preceded by a dreaming consciousness, and this by a sleeping consciousness, both for the individual and for humanity as a whole. So, too, outer vision by means of the physical apparatus of the eye was preceded by an inner vision. In dreams we still experience this inner vision; we use it in the activity of our picture-forming imagination; and it plays continuously upon the process of external sight. Why we fail to notice this when using our eye in the ordinary way, is because of that dazzling process mentioned earlier in this book. Goethe's constant endeavour was not to become the victim of this blindness - that is, not to be led by day-time experience to forget the night-side of human life. The pa.s.sage 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage 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 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 n.o.body 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, having a tendency to chill and subdue the feelings, and to resolve all things into atoms and numbers. For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one, it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist. I much question whether anyone who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure and reverence an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow.'

What Ruskin did not guess was that the rudiments of the 'moral theory of light' for which he craved, as this pa.s.sage indicates, had been established by Goethe long before.

In the section of his Farbenlehre dealing with 'physiological colours', Goethe devotes by far the most s.p.a.ce to the so-called 'afterimages'

which appear in the eye as the result of stimulation by external light, and persist for some little time. To create such an afterimage in a simple way, one need only gaze at a brightly lit window and then at a faintly lit wall of the room. The picture of the window appears there, but with the light-values reversed: the dark cross-bar appears as light, and the bright panes as dark.

In describing this phenomenon Goethe first gives the usual explanation, that the part of the retina which was exposed to the light from the window-panes gets tired, and is therefore blunted for further impressions, whereas the part on which the image of the dark frame fell is rested, and so is more sensitive to the uniform impression of the wall. Goethe, however, at once adds that although this explanation may seem adequate for this special instance, there are other phenomena which can be accounted for only if they are held to derive from a 'higher source'. Goethe means experiences with coloured after-images.

This will be confirmed by our own discussion of the subject.

What we first need, however, is a closer insight into the physiological process in the eye which causes the after-images as such. Wherever Goethe speaks of a simple activity of the retina, we are in fact concerned with a co-operation of the retina with other parts of our organ of sight. In order to make this clear, let us consider how the eye adapts itself to varying conditions of light and darkness.

It is well known that if the eye has become adjusted to darkness it is dazzled if suddenly exposed to light, even though the light be of no more than quite ordinary brightness. Here we enter a border region where the seeing process begins to pa.s.s over into a pathological condition.4 A 'secret' of the effect of light on the eye is here revealed which remains hidden in ordinary vision, for normally the different forces working together in the eye hold each other in balance, so that none is able to manifest separately. This equilibrium is disturbed, however, when we suddenly expose the eye to light while it is adapted to darkness. The light then acts on the eye in its usual way, but without the immediate counter-action which normally restores the balance. Under these conditions we notice that the sudden dazzling has a painful influence on the eye - that is, an influence in some way destructive. This will not seem surprising if we remember that when light strikes on the background of the eye, consciousness is quickened, and this, as we know, presupposes a breaking down of substance in some part of the nervous system. Such a process does in fact occur in the retina, the nerve-part of the eye, when external light falls upon it.

If the eye were solely a structure of nerves, it would be so far destroyed by the impact of light that it could not be restored even by sleep, as are the more inward parts of the nervous system. But the eye receives also a flow of blood, and we know that throughout the threefold human organism the blood supplies the nervous system with building-up forces, polarically opposite to the destructive ones. In sleep, as we have already seen, the interruption of consciousness allows the blood to inundate the nervous system, as it were, with its healing, building-up activity. It is not necessary, however, for the whole of the body to pa.s.s into a condition of sleep before this activity can occur. It functions to some extent also in the waking state, especially in those parts of the organism which, like the eye, serve in the highest degree the unfolding of consciousness.

Having established this, we have a basis for an understanding of the complete process of vision. We see that it is by no means solely the nerve part of the eye which is responsible for vision, as the spectator-physiology was bound to imagine. The very fact that the place where the optic nerve enters the eye is blind indicates that the function of mediating sight cannot be ascribed to the nerve alone. What we call 'seeing' is far more the result of an interplay between the retina carrying the nerves, and the choroid carrying the blood-vessels.

In this interplay the nerves are the pa.s.sive, receptive organ for the inworking of external light, while the blood-activity comes to meet the nerve-process with a precisely correlated action. In this action we find what Goethe called the 'inner light'.

The process involved in adaptation now becomes comprehensible. The cause of the dazzling effect of light of normal intensity on an eye adapted to the dark, is that in such an eye the blood is in a state of rest, and this prevents it from exercising quickly enough the necessary counter-action to the influence of the light. A corresponding effect occurs when one suddenly exposes to darkness the eye adapted to light.

One can easily observe what goes on then, if, after looking for a time at an undifferentiated light surface such as the evenly luminous sky, one covers the opened eyes with the hollowed hands. It will then be found that the s.p.a.ce before the eyes is filled by a sort of white light, and by paying close attention one recognizes that it streams from the eyes out into the hollowed s.p.a.ce. It may even be several minutes before the field of vision really appears black, that is, before the activity of the inner light in the choroid has so far died away that equilibrium prevails between the non-stimulated nerves and the non-stimulated blood.