AND ALLIED CONDITIONS.- — HAREIS. 315 



In the novel Christopher by Hichard Pryce, (^^) there 

 is an interesting allusion to a boy who is described as not 

 morbid although he is evidently a synsesthete and a coloured 

 thinker. He talks of playing the sunset on the piano (a 

 colour-phonism), and of smelling moonlight (a light-olf ac- 

 tion). In a novel, Youth's Encounter, {^^) published in 

 the year 1913 we are told that to one of the characters, 

 "Monday was dull red, Tuesday was cream-coloured, Thurs- 

 day was dingy purple, Friday was a harsh scarlet, but Wed- 

 nesday was vivid apple-green, or was it a clear, cool blue?" 



It is difficult to express the character of these , coloured 

 concepts to persons — and they are the majority of people — - 

 who never experience this sort of thing at any time. The 

 colours are not present so vividly as to constitute hallucina- 

 tions. Coloured visualizings never become hallucinatory, 

 possibly because they are of the nature of thoughts, rather 

 than of subjective sensations. Chromatic conception belongs 

 to the physiology not to the pathology of mind. Coloured 

 thinkers are not continually plagued with phantasmagoria. 

 Mental colourings do not obtrude themselves into one's 

 mental life, they are habitual, natural, chromatic tincturings 

 of one's concepts, and have been so long present to 

 consciousness that they have long ago become part of one's 

 mental belongings. They are invariable and definite with- 

 out being disturbing. 



One coloured thinker has thus expressed himself: "When 

 I think at all definitely about the month of January, the 

 name or word appears to me reddish, whereas April is white, 

 May yellow, the vowel 'i' is always black, the letter 'o' 

 white, and 'w' indigo-blue. Only by a determined effort 

 can I think of 'b' as green or blue, for me it always has been 

 and must be black; to imagine August as anything but 

 white seems to me an impossiblity, an altering of the in- 

 herent nature of things." There is thus an inherent definite- 

 ness, finality, and constancy about each thinker's psycho- 



