COLOURED THINKING 143 



The present author's observations fully confirm this point ; he 

 has in his possession many letters from coloured thinkers in 

 which the details of their psychochromes differ in the widest 

 possible manner, but all agree in that they testify to the very 

 early age at which the associations were formed. After the 

 publication of the writer's article in the Scotsman, December 29, 

 1908 (59), he received a number of letters spontaneously sent, all 

 emphasising this feature in such phrases as, "ever since I can 

 remember," " ever since childhood I have always had it," " I do 

 not remember the time when I had not," etc. A writer in 

 Nature in 1891 (29) reports on the psychochromes of his 

 daughter when seven years old, at which age she had specific- 

 ally different colours for the days of the week, namely, blue, 

 pink, brown or grey, brown or grey, white, white, and black. 

 The months of the year were coloured in the following way by 

 a girl often who had so thought of them ever since she could 

 remember— brown, olive-green, " art blue," green-yellow, pink, 

 pale green, pale mauve, orange, orange-brown, grey, grey out- 

 lined in black, and finally red. 



A boy ten years old is reported in the article on Colour 

 Hearing in the British Review (65) to have " noticed that the 

 number 8 invariably provoked in him the sensation of apricot 

 yellow, and the number 15 that of peacock blue." There 

 seems not the slightest doubt that these colour associations 

 are amongst the earliest that are formed in the child mind of 

 the coloured thinker. 



The second characteristic of coloured thinking is the un- 

 changeableness of the colour thought of. Middle-aged people 

 will tell you that there has been no alteration in the colours or 

 even in the tints and shades of colour which for many years 

 they have associated with their various concepts. Galton 

 remarked on this in his original monograph ; " they are very 

 little altered," he said, " by the accidents of education." Galton's 

 phrase was, " they result from Nature not nurture." Just as 

 their origination is not due to the influence of the environment, 

 so the environment exercises no modifying influence on them 

 during a long life. 



The third characteristic of psychochromes is their extreme 

 definiteness in the minds of their possessors. Contrary to what 

 might reasonably be expected, the precise colours attached to 

 concepts are by no means vague or incapable of accurate verbal 



