The Mystery of Light

[Rimbaud]

Lal - I think I read this scene in a different fashion to you. For me, the conversation about colours is a superficial symbolism, the whole of the import hinging actually on the aphorism "and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom".

This is not so much about white being 'good' and other colours being 'lesser', although that is the surface meaning - and little do you need telling why it would be read so. Neither do I think this is a comment on the appliance of science, which through the very deconstruction of perceived ideas, 'breaks things to see how they work'. Rather, I think this is about changing what is pure to suit your own ends, and thusly making that which was pure impure in turn.

That is to say: Saruman believes that the constituent parts of colour, of light itself, were greater than the whole. However, Gandalf argues that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in creation.