262 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



undoubtedly led to the discovery of his three laws, and I 

 think that his views, together with the popular way of referring 

 to colours as " harmonising," must have had some weight with 

 Newton ; Newton's own theological writings show he was 

 not averse to mystical speculation. Kepler's ways of thinking 

 appear foreign to physicists nowadays, because his con- 

 temporary Galileo inaugurated the experimental method and 

 revolutionised scientific thinking. 



At the present day there is much confused thinking about 

 the harmony of colours and the psychological effect of colours. 

 Apart from the eloquent utterances of the art critics, which 

 fill pages, but which melt away into a few bald, often mutually 

 contradictory sentences in the hands of the physicist who 

 tries to reduce them to concrete, definite statements, there are 

 those who believe in the possibility of " colour music," i.e. that 

 by witnessing the projection of colours in rhythmic succession 

 on a screen we are able to experience the same enjoyment 

 that we do in hearing music. For this purpose instruments 

 called colour organs have been devised. Then there are some 

 who believe that colour in itself has a psychological effect, 

 that blue is cold, yellow sickening, green restful, red maddening, 

 etc. A curious instance about which one would like to hear 

 more is given in support of this in an article by Maurice Leblanc 

 on the mercury arc lamp in the Journ. de Phys. (4) 4, p. 416, 

 1905. He states that in a certain department of the Lumiere 

 factory at Lyons red lights were employed. They had a 

 bad psychological effect ; the staff became " ingouvernable." 

 Green lights were then substituted with the best results. Also 

 we have a musical composer, Herman Darewski (Pearson's 

 Mag., Dec. 191 6), who regards colour and tone as " being 

 brothers and sisters " and who states he finds composition 

 facilitated by wearing coloured glasses. Deep blue and deep 

 mauve, for example, make him depressed, grass-green soothed, 

 pale pink fanciful, purple doleful, etc. All the above reduces, 

 I think, to the simple facts, that by education and training 

 we find certain combinations of colours harsh and other com- 

 binations pleasing, and that colours suggest definite things to 

 us ; red suggests blood or a fire, orange sunshine, green suggests 

 green fields and trees, bluish-white ice or moonlight, etc. 

 Beyond this statement there is nothing definite to go upon. 

 It will be noticed that in the passage cited above Newton 



