THE COLORS OF LETTERS. 367 



THE COLORS OF LETTERS. 



By DAVID STARK JOED AN. 



PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD, JUNIOR, UNIVERSITY. 



THERE are certain powers possessed by childhood, which 

 grow weak or disappear with advancing age or wisdom, 

 until at last all recollection of them is lost. One of these is the 

 ability to recognize shades of color in ideas or objects which can 

 have no color at all. Now and then some trace of this power per- 

 sists through life, and even in connection with some degree of 

 maturity of judgment. It is then looked upon as a mild halluci- 

 nation, provoking a smile of sympathy or of incredulity, but not 

 regarded by the person himself still less by his friends as pos- 

 sessing any value or significance. 



Nevertheless, such associations have a degree of psychological 

 interest. A chapter has been devoted to them in Francis Galton's 

 admirable work, Inquiries into Human Faculty; an interesting 

 essay on Word Color has also been very recently published by 

 Prof. Edward Spencer, of Moore's Hill College.* As a supple- 

 ment to Galton's work, and as a contribution toward the more 

 exact knowledge of the associations in the human mind of color 

 with conceptions with which the idea of color is incongruous, the 

 present paper is written. And as what I have to say is in a large 

 degree subjective, partaking of the nature of a confession, the use 

 of the first person may be pardoned. 



In my youth I always associated the idea of color with the 

 letters of the alphabet. In later years the discovery that other 

 people recognized no such coloration came to me as a surprise. 

 The letter R, for example, always calls up the idea of greenness. 

 It is impossible for me to think of R without the thought that it 

 is green. In like manner S is yellow, and X scarlet. The colora- 

 tion does not seem to lie in the letter itself, as printed or written, 

 but to coexist with the conception which the letter represents. 

 As the letter R comes into my mind, it seems to go, with grass and 

 leaves, into the category of green things. The sound has nothing 

 to do with its apparent coloration, for C soft and C hard are 

 recognized as the same letter and therefore colored alike. The 

 coloration is not affected by the character of the type. It is in the 

 letter itself, regardless of the way in which it may be printed, or 

 of whether it is printed or written at all. The idea has no connec- 

 tion with the lettering in any colored picture books, nor does it 

 arise from any association of that sort. 



* Proceedings of the Indiana College Association for 1889, pp. 40-45, published De- 

 cember, 1890. 



