COLOURED THINKING 145 



subject are unanimous in denying that, at any rate, coloured 

 thinking is due to environmental influences. 



It may now be asked what manner of people are they who 

 are coloured hearers or coloured thinkers or both. The late 

 Mr. Galton told us that they are rather above than below the 

 average intelligence. The writer's observations would in the 

 main confirm this ; they are at least invariably well educated 

 persons who confess to being coloured thinkers. In his book 

 Mr. Galton gave a few names of distinguished persons of his 

 acquaintance, and his list might be brought up to date by the 

 addition of some names quite as distinguished. But all persons 

 who have coloured hearing or coloured thinking are not neces- 

 sarily distinguished — a large number, as we have seen, are yet 

 children — but they are all probably more or less sensitive. 

 Possibly they are more given to introspection than is the 

 ordinary person. At any rate, what is quite certain is that both 

 synaesthetes and psychochromaesthetes belong to the group of 

 strong visuals or "seers" as Galton called them. Seers are 

 persons who visualise or exteriorise their concepts either as 

 uncoloured forms or as coloured in some way or other. The 

 uncoloured thought-forms are very curious, some of which 

 Galton gave as examples in the appendix to his work. One 

 distinguished neurologist always sees the numerals 1 to 100 

 in the form of a ladder sloping upwards from left to right 

 into the sky. As this concept is not coloured it cannot be called 

 a psychochrome, but it might be called a psychogram. A 

 psychogram is, then, the uncoloured thought-form of a concept, 

 and people who have psychograms must be strong visualisers. 



The school of symbolist poets in France to which Ghil, 

 Malarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine belong, appears to lay a great 

 deal of stress on the so-called meaning of colours. The school 

 evident^ includes both coloured hearers and coloured thinkers ; 

 but whereas the majority of coloured thinkers derive no par- 

 ticular meaning from their psychochromes, the symbolists 

 attach considerable significance to the colours which happen 

 to be associated with their thoughts. The different vowels, for 

 instance, mean to them or represent for them particular 

 emotions or states of mind not in virtue of the sound of the 

 vowel but entirely through the related colour. The particular 

 emotion symbolised by any given colour seems to the ordinary 

 person rather arbitrary if we judge by the details in Rimbaud's 

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