The colors opposite in the figure complete each other in white, hence are called complementary colors—red and green, orange and blue, yellow and violet. These are the harmonious colors.
Two colors, between which there is only one intermediate color, constitute characteristic combinations of color, as Goethe calls them—for instance, red and yellow, yellow and blue, blue and red—and are the combinations most common in uniforms.
In regard to the symbolism of colors, Oersted gives the following enumeration:
White fitly typifies innocence; the purity of snow and summer clouds, and all the analogies of nature, suggesting and completing its significance. Black, which, as the withdrawal of light, denotes loss of life-giving power, as in night, and to which is added in the storm-cloud unwonted gloom and desolation, stands appropriately for the color of mourning. Red is the color of love, from the hue of the blood, to which
is united the idea of the heart, heat, and intensity of life. Yellow denotes falsehood, as indicating the deceitfulness of that which shines, also as the color which, when it departs from purity, soonest becomes disagreeable. Green symbolizes hope, the green of spring in nature giving token of the fruition of summer. “If we consider also,” says Oersted, “the satisfaction with which the eye can rest on it, we should call it the color of trust. Blue,” he adds, “is called the color of fidelity, but since faith, hope, and love are so frequently named together, and the two last each has its symbolical color, we might assume that one of the colors belonged to this noble quality. It is evident that blue, since it indicates distance, vacuity from matter, therefore the immaterial is suitable as a symbol of faith. It is the color of the sky also, and this leads us away from the earthly. Then the repose in blue, and the feeling that of all colors it is the least splendid, with the exception of violet, which, when unmingled with red, really the violet of light, is so feeble, and has in it so little power, that it is not much considered. Goethe says that blue is a ‘stimulating negation.’ We learn from natural science that blue united with violet is reflected back every time that light passes through a less occupied space, namely, a vacuum, hence Goethe’s expression. Violet and blue also indicate darkness, since they are the colors which have the least light in them, and the pigments which they represent are easiest converted into black.
Faith, which looks up out of the blackness and shadow of death into the full-orbed splendor of the sun of righteousness, may not inappropriately take for its symbol the “stimulating negation” of the poet.
Thus do the three primary colors, blue, green, and red, represent the triad of Christian graces, the primary virtues of the Christian life—faith, hope, and charity, or love.
But leaving the poetry of color, we come to the subject of its place and function as it imprints itself on the myriad forms of the organic world. The question has been asked, Are all these tints of nature in the flower and shrub, the gorgeous plumage of the bird, only meant to please the eye of man and to gratify the artistic sense? Is there a deeper, subtler purpose running through all this apparently wanton pageantry, aside from the delight which it affords the mind of man, and looking only to the perfecting and preservation of the organism itself?
A utilitarian age has answered in the affirmative, and the researches of Darwin, Wallace, and others are daily opening new vistas into this interesting field of inquiry.