Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Light

“The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light, for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer... If the eye were not sunlike, how could we perceive the light?”

“The obstacle was what Schiller and Koerner once called the "sensual element" in Goethe's philosophy, and which, years after the death of both Kant and Schiller, came out in Goethe in a most typical fashion when young Schopenhauer, a zealous and thorough-going Kantian, tried to explain that light would cease to exist along with the seeing eye. "What!" he said, according to Schopenhauer's own report, "looking at him with his Jove-like eyes,"—"You should rather say that you would not exist if the light could not see you?"”