156 BIRDS AND MAN 



that any man can revel at will among his own 

 personal feelings and associations ; that these 

 were a " kind of bloom on the intrinsic beauty of 

 things " — a happy phrase ! He then asks : " What 

 does blue suggest to a sailor ? Sometimes the sea, 

 sometimes the sky, sometimes the Blue Peter ; 

 but if you ask him what does blue paint suggest 

 he would say mourning, that being the colour of 

 a ship's mourning. Dr Sutton always called blue 

 no colour, because it was the colour of death, the 

 sign of the withdrawal of life." 



This was interesting but fails as an argument 

 since it was taken for granted in the chapter that 

 blue in a flower or anything else, and in fact any 

 colour, possesses individual associations for every 

 one of us, according to what we are, to the temper 

 of our minds, to the conditions in which we exist, 

 our vocation, our early life, and so on. Blue may 

 suggest sea and sky and the Blue Peter to a sailor, 

 and yet the blue flower have an expression due 

 to its human association in him as in another. 



But my critic dropped by chance into something 

 better, when he went on to ask, " Why shouldn't 

 the heaven's blue make us love flowers ? It does 

 in my case I know, and I can feel the different blues 

 of skies and air and distance in flower blue." 



