COLOURED THINKING 141 



Tuesday was cream coloured, Thursday was dingy purple, 

 Friday was a harsh scarlet, but Wednesday was vivid apple- 

 green, or was it a clear, cool blue ? " 



It is difficult to express the character of these coloured 

 concepts to persons — and they are the majority of people — who 

 never experience this sort of thing at any time. The colours 

 are not present so vividly as to constitute hallucination. 

 Coloured visualisings never become hallucinatory, possibly 

 because they are of the nature of thoughts, rather than of 

 subjective sensations. Chromatic conception belongs to the 

 physiology, not to the pathology of mind. Coloured thinkers 

 are not continually plagued with phantasmagoria. Mental 

 colourings do not obtrude themselves into our mental life ; 

 they are habitual, natural, chromatic tincturings of one's con- 

 cepts, and have been so long present to one's consciousness 

 that they have long ago become part of our mental belongings. 

 They are invariable and definite without being disturbing. 



One coloured thinker has thus expressed himself: "When 

 I think at all definitely about the month of January the name 

 or word appears to me reddish, whereas April is white, May 

 yellow, the vowel ' i ' is always black, the letter ' o ' white, and 

 1 w ' indigo-blue. Only by a determined effort can I think of ' b ' 

 as green or blue, for me it always has been and must be black ; 

 to imagine August as anything but white seems to me an 

 impossibility, an altering of the inherent nature of things." 

 There is, thus, an inherent definiteness, finality, and constancy 

 about each thinker's psychochromes that is very striking. But 

 it is not alone letters and words that are habitually thought 

 of as coloured, certain coloured thinkers always associate a 

 particular colour with their thoughts about a particular person. 



The author of The Corner of Harley Street remarks (p. 251): 

 " If only we could use colours now to express our deeper 

 attitude on these occasions, as some of your fellow clergy wear 

 stoles at certain seasons, with what pleasant impunity could we 

 write to one another in yellow or purple or red, leaving black 

 for the editor of the Times, or the plumber whose bill we are 

 disputing." 



"Our alphabet is not rich enough for the notation of the 

 cockney dialect," writes Mr. Richard Whiteing in No. 5, John 

 Street. " I can but indicate his speech system by a stray word 

 which, if there is anything in the theory of the correspondence 



