Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 260 pages of information about Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664).

Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 260 pages of information about Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664).
other Diaphanous bodies be every where almost fill’d with such Globuli as the Cartesians suppose, the Various kind of Motion of these Globuli, may in many cases have no small stroak in Varying our Perception of Colour, so without the Supposition of these Globuli, which ’tis not so easie to evince, I think we may probably enough conceive in general, that the Eye may be Variously affected, not only by the Entire Beams of Light that fall upon it as they are such, but by the Order, and by the Degree of Swiftness, and in a word by the Manner according to which the Particles that compose each Particular Beam arrive at the Sensory, so that whatever be the Figure of the Little Corpuscles, of which the Beams of Light consist, not only the Celerity or Slowness of their Revolution or Rotation in reference to their Progressive Motion, but their more Absolute Celerity, their Direct or Undulating Motion, and other Accidents, which may attend their Appulse to the Eye, may fit them to make Differing Impressions on it.

4.  Secondly, For these and the like Considerations, Pyrophilus, I must desire that you would look upon this little Treatise, not as a Discourse written Principally to maintain any of the fore-mention’d Theories, Exclusively to all others, or substitute a New one of my Own, but as the beginning of a History of Colours, upon which, when you and your Ingenious friends shall have Enrich’d it, a Solid Theory may be safely built.  But yet because this History is not meant barely for a Register of the things recorded in it, but for an Apparatus to a sound and comprehensitive Hypothesis, I thought fit, so to temper the whole Discourse, as to make it as conducible, as conveniently I can to that End, and therefore I have not scrupled to let you see that I was willing, as to save you the labour of Cultivating some Theories that I thought would never enable you to reach the Ends you aim at, so to contract your Enquiries into a Narrow compass, for both which purposes I thought it requisite to do these two things, the One, to set down some Experiments which by the help of the Reflections and Insinuations that attend them, may assist you to discover the Infirmness and Insufficiency both of the common Peripatetick Doctrine, and of the now more applauded Theory of the Chymists about Colour, because those two Doctrines having Possess’d themselves, the one of the most part of the Schools, and the other of the Esteem of the Generality ef Physicians and other Learned Men, whose Professions and Ways of Study do not exact that they should Scrupulously examine the very First and Simplest Principles of Nature, I fear’d it would be to little purpose, without doing something to discover the Insufficiency of these Hypotheses, that I should, (which was the Other thing I thought requisite for me to do) set down among my other Experiments those in the greatest Number, that may let you see, that, till I shall be Better Inform’d, I encline to take Colour to be a Modification of Light, and would invite you chiefly to Cultivate that Hypothesis, and Improve it to the making out of the Generation of Particular Colours, as I have Endeavour’d to apply it to the Explication of Whiteness and Blackness.

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Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.