COLOURED THINKING 139 



as when the word scarlet is scarlet, black black, and white 

 white. But an examination of psychochromes shows us that 

 this reasonableness does not necessarily always occur. Thus 

 the word " apple" is to one coloured thinker a slate-grey, which 

 is not the colour of any real apple, and the word " cucumber " to 

 the same person is white ; now only the inside of the vegetable 

 itself is white. 



Some kind of method, however, may be traced in this 

 chromatic madness, for, according to Bleuler(3i), high-pitched 

 notes produce the lighter tints of colour, but low-pitched the 

 darker shades. According to this authority the colours oftenest 

 aroused in the synaesthesia, sound-photism, are dark brown, 

 dark red, yellow, and white, which is not at all the statement of 

 the frequency of occurrence in coloured thinking. From the 

 records of the psychochromes of two brothers, the relative order 

 of frequency of the colours is white or grey, brown, black, 

 yellow, red, green and blue ; violet and indigo not occurring. 

 Dr. Helene Stelzner (51) says that green is the colour least 

 commonly thought of. But individual differences are extreme : 

 thus both purple and violet are such favourites with some 

 coloured thinkers that they hardly ever think in terms of any 

 other colours. The present writer (55) has examined the psycho- 

 chromes of two men, one woman, and one child, with the result 

 that the relative order of frequency of occurrence comes out as 

 white, brown, black, yellow, green, blue, red, pink, cream, 

 orange, and purple. It is thus clear that the colours thought of 

 are not exclusively the pure or spectral ones, for certain non- 

 spectral colours like brown, pink, cream, white, and black are 

 quite commonly reported. The novelist Ellen Thorneycroft 

 Fowler, in a private communication to the author, wrote : " The 

 colour which I always associate with myself, for no earthly 

 reason that I can discover, is blue. Therefore ' E.,' my initial 

 letter, is blue, April the month of my birthday is blue, and 9 the 

 date of my birthday is blue." This is known as " colour 

 individuation," and has been made a special study of by Paul 

 Sokolov (47) in his paper " L'individuation coloree," read before 

 the Fourth International Congress of Psychology held at Paris 

 in 1900. Some people, in short, have their favourite colours, 

 and with these they invest their pleasant thoughts, while their 

 unpleasant thoughts they find coloured by the tints they are not 

 fond of. 



