yellow vs. blue so that mixing could occur across pairs (e.g., a yellowish green or a yellowish red) but not within a pair (i.e., greenish red cannot be imagined). An achromatic opponent process along black and white is also part of Hering's explanation of color perception. Hering asserted that we did not know why these color relationships were true but knew that they were. Red, green, yellow, and blue (sometimes with white and black) are known as the psychological primaries. Although there is a great deal of evidence for the opponent process in the form of neural mechanisms, there is currently no clear mapping of the psychological primaries to neural substrates. The psychological primaries were applied by Richard S. Hunter as the primaries for Hunter L,a,b colorspace that led to the creation of CIELAB. The Natural Color System is also directly inspired by the psychological primaries. History Philosophy Philosophical writing from ancient Greece has described notions of primary colors but they can be difficult to interpret in terms of modern color science. Theophrastus (ca. 371–287 BCE) described Democritus’ position that the primary colors were white, black, red, and green. In Classical Greece, Empedocles identified white, black, red, and, (depending on the interpretation) either yellow or green as primary colors. Aristotle described a notion in which white and black could be mixed in different ratios to yield chromatic colors; this idea had considerable influence in Western thinking about color. François d'Aguilon's notion of the five primary colors (white, yellow, red, blue, black) was influenced by Aristotle's idea of the chromatic colors being made of black and white.The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explored color-related ideas using red, green, blue, and yellow as primary colors. Light and color vision Isaac Newton used the term "primary color" to describe the colored spectral components of sunlight. A number of color theorists did not agree with Newton's work, David Brewster advocated that red, yellow, and blue light could be combined into any spectral hue late into the 1840s. Thomas Young proposed red, green, and violet as the three primary colors, while James Clerk Maxwell favored changing violet to blue. Hermann von Helmholtz proposed "a slightly purplish red, a vegetation-green, slightly yellowish, and an ultramarine-blue" as a trio. Newton, Young, Maxwell, and Helmholtz were all prominent contributors to "modern color science" that ultimately described the perception of color in terms of the three types of retinal