no FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



not attributed to a fundamental property of all 

 organic beings. 



Inherited endowments are of the most varied 

 nature, some eminently useful in the struggle for 

 existence, others as conspicuously without any 

 obvious significance. Take as a type of the latter 

 those very curious, indissoluble and apparently 

 inexplicable associations known as " coloured 

 concepts/' what I have called cases of psycho- 

 chromaesthesia. I have collected * a considerable 

 number of examples of these coloured concepts, 

 and arrived at the negative conclusion that they 

 are certainly not environmentally produced. In 

 some cases they were preformed, appearing to 

 very young children as ready-made associations. 

 As far as I can gather, they are never acquired but 

 always innate : they are not synaesthesial such as 

 coloured hearing (Audition color ee, as when a 

 certain note on the organ or violin appears blue 

 or purple), but occur when every letter of the 

 alphabet, every hour of the day, every day of the 

 week, every month of the year and so on, seems, 

 on its name being visualised, to be written or 

 printed in colour : they are in my terminology 

 eminently inertial. 



Still more extraordinary as revealing the innate 

 contents of the human mind, are those most curious 

 cases of certain persons during attacks of insanity 

 or in hypnosis using words of a character absolutely 



* D. F. Harris, " Psychochromaesthesia and certain Synaesthesiae," 

 Edinburgh Medical Journal, December 1905. 



