AND ALLIED CONDITIONS. HARRIS. 311 



a light- or colour-phonism. When a taste is coupled with 

 a sound, we have a taste-phonism and there may exist 

 odour-, touch-, temperature- or pain-phonisms respectively. 

 Sometimes the second sensation linked is of a more 

 vague character, as when screeching sounds produce 

 disagreeable general sensations very difficult to describe. 

 They have been called secondary sensations of general 

 feeling, and they may be akin to those unpleasant 

 sensations evidently experienced by dogs and other animals 

 when they hear music. The late Mr. Grant Allen was 

 evidently alluding to this kind of thing when he wrote in an 

 article on "Scales and Colours," that " Chaos was 

 in dark and gloomy colours, whereas light was treated in 

 white" in such a work as Hadyn's "Creation." 



Bleuler(^^) believes that phonisms of high pitch are pro- 

 duced by bright lights, well defined outlines, small and 

 pointed forms, whereas phonisms of low pitch are produced 

 by the opposite conditions. An interesting point may be 

 mentioned in connexion with the difference in colour aroused 

 by spoken words and by whispering. Dr. Hel^ne Stelzner(^) 

 tells us that in her own case full-toned speech appears as a 

 coloured picture, whereas whispering, with its much less 

 resonant vowels, appears like a copper-plate engraving, 

 that is, as non-chromatic. 



Quite apart from all these things — synsesthesia — is 

 coloured thinking or chromatic mentation. Here it is not 

 a question of a sensation being present at all, it is that cer- 

 tain persons who have this power, faculty or disability 

 cannot visualize any concept without seeing it in "the mind's 

 eye" as coloured in some way or other. Indeed, the majority 

 of the coloured thinkers questioned by the author do not 

 experience colours when they hear sounds or musical tones, 

 but they cannot think of anything definitely, the month, 

 the day, the hour, without its being thoughts of as red 

 or yellow or black or white or brown or green or blue. There 



