314 COLOURED THINKING 



Apart, however, from whether certain colours are fav- 

 ourites or not, some few persons have the consciousness of a 

 colour more or less present with them. Thus, R. L. Steven- 

 son had, so he tells us, a feeling of brown which, during his 

 attacks of fever, was unusually distinct. It was "a peculiar 

 shade of brown, something like sealskin". 



As might be expected, so acute an observer as Mr. Rudyard 

 Kipling has not failed to notice coloured thinking. In 

 his very curious story "They",( 52 ) he describes the colour 

 concepts experienced by a blind old lady who opens an 

 interview by complaining that certain colours purple and 

 black hurt her. Her visitor asks, "And what are the 

 colours at the top of whatever you see?" "I see them so," 

 she replies, "white, green, yellow, red, purple; and when people 

 are very bad, black across the red, as you were just now." 

 The old lady goes on to say that ever since she was quite a 

 child some colours hurt her, and some made her happy. 

 "I only found out afterwards that other people did not see 

 the colours." So unfamiliar is coloured thinking to the 

 ordinary person that a critic wrote (The Academy and 

 Literature, October 8th, 1904) "Such tales as 'They' are 

 sheer conundrums." Another writer asked more pertinently, 

 "Are the colours the blind woman described, the colours 

 of different thoughts?" 



In Mrs. Felkin's novel, In subjection ( 43 ) (1900), the 

 heroine, Isabel Seton, is evidently a coloured thinker. Some 

 of her colour associations are given on page 149. The 

 novelist, in a letter to the writer, was good enough to explain 

 that these experiences of her heroine are based on those of 

 an actual prototype, some of whose additional psychochromes 

 she has kindly mentioned. Isabel Seton has synsesthesia 

 also, for the actual sounds of voices call up colours. Thus, 

 soprano voices are to her pale blue or green or yellow or 

 white; contraltos are pink or red or violet; tenors are dif- 

 ferent shades of brown; while basses are black or dark green 

 or navy blue. 



