COLOURED THINKING AND ALLIED CONDITIONS. — HARRIS. 309 



who will tell you, for instance, that Sunday is yellow, Wed- 

 nesdaj' brown, Friday black, may not experience any sensa- 

 tion of colour on hearing the organ played or a song sung. 

 Certain persons are indeed coloured hearers as well as coloured 

 thinkers; but we should distinguish the person who has 

 linked sensations, a synsesthete, from the person whose 

 thoughts are coloured, whose mentation is chromatic, 

 who is, in fact, a psychochromsesthete. 



The literature of synesthesia is much more extensive than 

 any one would be inclined to think who had not made it a 

 special study. Nor is the condition described only in tech- 

 nical publications; there is an increasing tendency to recog- 

 nize it in current fiction. Thus in "Dorian Grey" we have — 

 "her voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone 

 it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour". Musicians, 

 it would appear, are particularly liable to hear in colours — 

 "The aria in A sharp (Schubert) is of so sunny a warmth 

 and of so delicate a green that it seems to me when I hear 

 it that I breathe the scent of young fir-trees". The musical 

 critic of the "Birmingham Daily Post" thus once complained 

 of a lady's singing; "Her voice should have been luscious 

 like purple grapes". Punch has, of course, not failed to 

 notice this tendency in musical criticism. A writer in the 

 ''Daily Telegraph" had thus expressed himself — "To a 

 rather dark coloured, deep, mezzo-soprano voice, the singer 

 joins a splendid temperament"; Punch remarked, "We, 

 ourselves, prefer a plum-coloured voice with blue stripes 

 or else something of a tartan timbre". 



Monsieur Peillaube(^^), editor of the Revue Philosphique, 

 has reported on four persons who have well marked coloured 

 hearing for organ notes, and he calls attention to the numerous 

 cases amongst musicians of definite associations between 

 notes and musical instruments on the one hand, and colours 

 on the other as well as between whole pieces of music and 

 colours. Thus Gounod, endeavouring to express the dif- 



