Abstract
II.
BEFORE propounding his theory, the author thinks it necessary to devote one memoir—the fourth—to an essay, the object of which is to define clearly the nature of the sensations of black and white and their mixture gray. He remarks that it is a habit to treat visual sensations rather according to their physical origin than by their own nature; and this peculiarly influences the ideas entertained about the sensations of black and white. We know that physically, white light is a combination of rays of all wave-lengths, and we have no physical notion of black except a negative one, namely, as an absence of light of any kind. Hence, transferring our physics to our physiology, we consider that our sensation of white is a positive one, but that our idea of black arises simply from the absence of all sensation; or, to use a metaphor drawn from painting, black is our canvas, or background, on which all our sensation-pictures are drawn in white or colours; as a result of this, all our reasoning is confined to the pictures, while the background receives no attention.
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POLE, W. Hering's Theory of the Vision of Light and Colours 1 . Nature 20, 637–639 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/020637a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/020637a0