THE PROBLEM OF COLORED AUDITION. 821 



and the attitudes of the participants recall to me what was said. 

 Successive pictures present themselves before my eyes, and those 

 pictures enable me to call back what I heard." That is a real 

 visual type. In determining the type, it is necessary also to 

 take account of the tastes of persons, their aptitudes, and their 

 favorite occupations. Most of those whom I have seen, practice 

 at painting or water colors, and some are painters by profession ; 

 others have been drawn by circumstances into different careers, 

 but nearly all of them love color and Nature and have a passion 

 for beautiful hues. Take notice also of their language. When- 

 ever they describe their mental condition they have a marvelous 

 abundance of picturesque expressions. Mr. Galton has justly 

 remarked that few of those who have colored audition are satis- 

 fied with laconically naming the colors of the vowels ; they must 

 exactly define the shade, even if they are talking of white a 

 sensation so simple and apparently so easy to define without an 

 epithet. They do not say, " O is white," but rather " O is a shade 

 of white, the color of white plush, or of the under side of a fresh 

 white mushroon." Another will say, " White mingled with milky 

 and a little yellow" or silver white, chalky white, etc. The 

 use of these expressions informs us concerning the chromatic 

 sense of these persons. They are colorists without doubt. We 

 who have dull imaginations have the same words at our disposal 

 as they, but we are unable to draw the same effects out of them. 

 Words are like the colors we use in painting. Give two identi- 

 cal palettes to two painters, one of whom is a colorist like De- 

 lacroix and the other a draughtsman like Ingres ; with the same 

 colors one will produce a brilliant and the other a subdued pic- 

 ture. What permits us to give color to the canvas, as well as 

 in the expression of our ideas, is, above everything else, the power 

 of mental vision. 



Our hypothesis is confirmed by some facts that have been 

 brought out in M. Claparede's investigation of " visual schemes " 

 or such figures as Mr. Galton has found some persons associat- 

 ing with their groupings of numbers, and which M. Claparede 

 has found may be associated with other abstract conceptions, 

 like the months and the days of the week. The results of his 

 inquiry showed a frequent coincidence of colored audition with 

 the faculty of forming such visual schemes. Without employ- 

 ing visual schemes, many persons represent the figures mentally 

 to themselves as if they were written out a method of repre- 

 sentation which is another good characteristic of their type of 

 memory. I have made an experiment on this point, instructive 

 to me, which repeated upon a number of persons has always 

 given concordant results. I pronounce five numbers to a person 

 and ask him to repeat them; then six, and then seven, till the 



