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118 pores for light, and this requires none—this absorption is regarded as a retrogression of light into the indifference of ether; indeed, light in conflict with matter does not continue light, but becomes a mean condition between light and darkness.

Colour orginates only in the confinity of light and dark, or in the limit between the two great antipodes, white and black. Darkness is the cause of colours. There is nothing visible but colour,—the coloured matter. The non-corporeal itself is invisible; darkness is the cause of visibility; were there no darkness there would be no world for the eye. Colours are only illuminated darkness. In the limit between light and dark there is neither white nor black, but their possible mediate conditions or the proper colours, the material tensions of ether. Colour agrees essentially with the elements, and is itself nothing different from element. Fire is in its essence red, as being the impartient of light and heat; air is in its essence nothing else than the blue ether, by virtue of its being gaseous; water is the green ether; earth the yellow. If the ether is tensed, it then becomes red or fire; if it attains its blue stage it becomes air; at the green stage water; upon the yellow, earth.

The elements are only gradations of light—colours. They have, therefore, been formed according to the laws of light; for colours are, without doubt, the legitimate developments of light. Red, as being the solar, or fire colour, ranks parallel with oxygen; the more powerful indeed the combustion, the more powerful is the oxidation, and by so much redder the flame. Matter also becomes red through oxidation. The red vanishes lastly into white, and thus the highest oxidation is white. Red is the warmest colour, and blue the coldest. Red retains its presence to the eye at a far greater distance than blue and green; though it is true an effect produces a colour of blue at a distance beyond the red, but this is only atmospheric effect. The greatest distance creates white. The sun in the firmament may be viewed as the bright opening in a darkened chamber. Colours, are, therefore, nothing but images of the sun in darkness; self-manifestations of the sun in dark matter. A point of light thrown into darkness is colour.