322 coLorRED thinking 



quence or rythm required by music, is open to serious 

 question. Such, hoT^-ever. is the intention of ]Mr. A. W. 

 Rimington, as explained in his book, "Colour in Music", (^^) 

 in which there is much that is true and interesting. "It 

 is undeniable," he ■writes, "that as a nation our colour sense 

 is practically dormant . . . Compare our colour sense 

 with that possessed by the Japanese, the Indians, or even the 

 Bulgarians and Spaniards. . . To my mind, a wide-spread, 

 refined colour-sense is more important than a musical one." 

 Long before Mr. Rimington's work was published, there 

 appeared a little book privately printed at Leith in Scotland 

 called "Chromography or tone-colour music" ("^)- The author 

 assigned a colour to each of the notes of the scale thus — 

 do = red, re = orange; mi = yellow: fa = green: sol = blue; 

 la = violet-purple; ti = red-purple. 



IMany persons have synsesthesia in connexion with 

 musical tones (sound-photisms) : two cases reported by 

 Albertoni(-'^) associated blue with the sound of Do (Cj; yellow 

 with Mi CE); and red with Sol (G). But it was discovered 

 that they were colour-blind for red (Daltonism). Xow, 

 whereas, they could recognize and name the other notes, 

 they could not name G, a disability which Albertoni thinks 

 was related to the Daltonism; he has accordingly called 

 it Auditory Daltonism ( (Daltonismus auditivusi, a psychical 

 deafness depending on the red-blindness since the note to 

 which they were psychically deaf was the one which called 

 up mentall.v the particular colour, red, to which they were 

 actually blind. 



It might be now asked whether we have any explanation 

 of the causes or causal conditions of coloured thinking; 

 why may thoughts be coloured at all; and why should par- 

 ticular thoughts come to be associated vrith particular 

 colours? Why should only a few persons, about 12 per 

 cent, in fact, be found to be coloured thinkers? The answers, 

 if answers they can be called, are disappointing in the extreme. 



