291. [267.] Concerning colors, Newton said that in the world he had believed them to arise from substances flowing continually from the solar ocean as differently colored particles of matter and attaching themselves constantly to like particles in objects in the world. So, too, when they pass through translucent materials, he had viewed them as then following paths of light according to its diffractions and refractions, and passing through them as counterpart to counterpart, thus red to red, blue to blue, yellow to yellow, and so on, as in the case of prisms, crystalline spheres, and vapors, which produce rainbows. Some angels, however, did not acknowledge this to be the cause of colors, saying that there are just as well colors in the spiritual world as in the natural world, and in the spiritual world ones more vivid, splendid, and variegated than in the natural world. Moreover, they know that colors are variegations of their light, they said, corresponding to their love or goodness and to their wisdom or truth, and that the sun from which their light emanates is the Lord Himself, whose Divine love surrounding Him produces the appearance of a sun, and whose Divine wisdom issuing from Him produces the appearance of light. They also said that from that sun-which, as they said, is pure love-no such substances or particles of matter as he described flow forth; but the pure light of that sun produces variegations of colors in objects according to the reception of wisdom by angels, the color red insofar as their wisdom originates from goodness, and the color white insofar as their wisdom originates from truth, and the rest of the colors as they are possessed of a deficiency or lack of these, which in their world corresponds to darkness in the natural world. Furthermore, through their spiritual ideas by which they are able both to present and to make manifest the causes of things vividly and to full assent, the angels demonstrated that colors are nothing else but variegations of a flaming light and white light in objects according to their forms, and that colors are not material substances, as light is not, because they correspond to the love and wisdom of angels, from which they emanate by Divine operation, and the love and wisdom of angels are not material substances but spiritual. In the world, too, heat and light are not material substances but natural, and they flow into material objects and are modified in them in accordance with the forms of their constituents. Consequently colors are not material substances either, as they would be if they sprang from differently colored atoms. Finally the angels said with some exasperation, "Who does not see the paradox in the Newtonian explanation, indeed, the absurdity?" And they went away, saying that they would return if Newton theorized about colors spiritually or even naturally, and not so materially and sensually. Some spirits then went over to him and said, "Think, please, of colors not from the perspective of some small prism or the way they appear on some wall, but from the perspective of the greenness of all the forests and all the grassy fields throughout the entire world in which you have been. Can you conceive of a continual emanation from the sun of a green color only, and at the same time of its flowing in and constant renewal? Can you conceive, too, of a continual flowing in of a grey or stony color into the mountains of the whole earth, and so on? Would you not then be conceiving of continuous oceans of only a green or stony color? Tell us where they go when they cease. Do they go off into the universe? Or do they sink down somewhere, or rise upward? Perhaps new worlds are formed from them, for from so large a mass they may be, being material substances." After thinking about the matter more deeply, Newton said, "Now I know that colors are modifications of light in objects, in whose forms light is variegated in accordance with the forms of their constituents, giving rise to colors." These are Newton's own words, which he wishes me to communicate.