ABSTRACT
Goethe was no prodigy; he was a quick-witted boy who learned easily, especially when an appeal was made to his love of games. This is a quality he retained. As an old man he could still say to his famulus, Riemer: ‘Above all no professionalism. That is against my nature. I want to do everything I can as though it were a game, just as it occurs to me and for so long as the inclination lasts. In my youth I used to play like this unconsciously, now I want to continue to do it consciously for the rest of my life.’ This is a somewhat dangerous principle to follow when one is trying to establish a scientific theory of colour, and is abusing all physicists as fools, which is precisely what Goethe was doing at the time he said this. As an element in children’s education the love of games has long held an honoured place. In those days things were different, and it speaks very well for Goethe’s father, regarded often merely as a pedant, that he went so far in condoning this propensity in his son. In any case, the father’s pedantry, described by the son when he himself had already become fairly inflexible, should not be taken too seriously. The fact is that the boy’s education, which was almost entirely in the hands of private tutors, proceeded quite unsystemati-cally even for those days, and much of this left its mark on him. Almost everything in the father’s large library seems somehow to have been brought into use: pictures, maps, engravings, travel books. And in his own old age Goethe, exactly like his father before him, never tired of displaying his treasures, and of explaining them to the ‘little children’, by whom he meant, more or less, everyone younger than himself.
