^HARRIS] COLOURED THINKING 11 



There is here and there a Httle method in tliis chromatic madness ; 

 thus, the colours of the words denoting colours themselves are appro- 

 priately coloured for most coloured thinkers; that is, white is white 

 black black, and so on. 



Again, in most cases, the colour of the initial letter determines 

 the colour of the whole word ; if "d " is black then decide will be black; 

 if the numeral I is white, then 10, 100, 1000, and so on, will all be 

 white. 



It might be thought that the coloured thought of a word would 

 be the colour of the sum of the colours of the letters composing the 

 word; but this is not so; for in one case "Tuesday" is white, and the 

 component colours are blue-black, grey, brown, yellow, brown, white 

 and yellow; colours which, when mixed, could not possibly "make" 

 white. 



The relative frequency of the colours met with on analyzing 

 100 psychochromes is: white 24%, brown 24%, black 17%, yellow 

 11%, green 7%, blue 5%, red 4%, pink 3%, cream 3%, orange 1%, 

 and purple 1%. 



Coloured thinking is by no means confined to women, as some 

 persons have assumed; I have found it very nearly as frequent in 

 men. 



It should be remarked that the colours are never present to 

 consciousness with the vividness of a hallucination, probably because 

 • they are related to concepts and not to sensations. They are not all 

 the time present to the seer as he speaks or reads, but only Avhen com- 

 pelled for some reason or another to visualize (exteriorize) his con- 

 cepts. He then finds he cannot visualize certain concepts as un- 

 coloured. 



Galton believed that coloured thinkers were as a rule above 

 rather than below the intellectual average. He mentions a number 

 of well-known pieu to which I have been able to add some equally 

 distinguished names. It is certain that coloured thinkers are not 

 abnormal mentally; it would be more correct to describe them as in 

 this respect supra-normal after the same manner that geniuses are 

 supra-normal. Just as genius, if not inherited, cannot be acquired, 

 so neither can coloured thinking. 



Dalhousie University, 

 Halifax, N.S. 



