On Vision and Colors tried to demonstrate physiologically that color is "specially modified activity of the retina." The initial basis for Schopenhauer's color theory comes from Goethe's chapter on physiological colors, which discusses three principal pairs of contrasting colors: red/green, orange/blue, and yellow/violet. This is in contrast to the customary emphasis on Newton's seven colors of the Newtonian spectrum. In accordance with Aristotle, Schopenhauer considered that colors arise by the mixture of shadowy, cloudy darkness with light. With white and black at each extreme of the scale, colors are arranged in a series according to the mathematical ratio between the proportions of light and
Prism so for a thin prism the deviation angle varies with wavelength according to René Descartes had seen light separated into the colors of the rainbow by glass or water, though the source of the color was unknown. Isaac Newton's 1666 experiment of bending white light through a prism demonstrated that all the colors already existed in the light, with different color "corpuscles" fanning out and traveling with different speeds through the prism. It was only later that Young and Fresnel combined Newton's particle theory with Huygens' wave theory to explain how color arises from the spectrum of light. Newton arrived