THE PROBLEM OF COLORED AUDITION. 813 



Those who for the first time hear these perceptions spoken of 

 experience great astonishment. They can not gain a clear idea of 

 them; the comparison of a sound with a color seems to them 

 wholly destitute of intelligible character. Meyerbeer has said 

 somewhere that certain chords of von Weber's music are purple. 

 What does the phrase mean ? Each of the words, taken by itself, 

 has a meaning. We know what a chord is, and we know purple ; 

 but joining the terms with a verb and saying the chord is purple, 

 is something we do not understand. As well say virtue is blue 

 and vice is yellow ; one is ready to ask if the construction of such 

 phrases is not a trickery of words, which are brought into purely 

 technical associations corresponding to no real association of 

 thought. 



Thus, to the immense majority of persons, colored audition is 

 a riddle. This is one of the reasons why the world for a long time 

 refused to believe in it, and treated as eccentrics those who con- 

 cerned themselves with it — a skepticism which was all the more 

 justified because the matter related to a subjective condition, the 

 existence of which has to be accepted on the simple word of the 

 person who experiences it. 



We do not know whether we can make the true nature of this 

 phenomenon understood, or whether we can help those who have 

 not experienced it to conceive of it ; but we hope to be able to 

 demonstrate that it is real. Deception has generally an individual 

 character ; it is the work of one person and not of many ; it gives 

 no occasion for massed effects which are repeated from one gener- 

 ation to another, and in different countries. The number of per- 

 sons who say they have colored audition must be taken into con- 

 sideration. According to Bleuler and Lehmann, it is twelve per 

 cent. M. Claparede, of the University of Geneva, who is now in- 

 vestigating the subject, writes us that of four hundred and seventy 

 persons who answered his questions, two hundred and five, or 

 forty-three per cent, had colored audition. Of course, this propor- 

 tion can not be taken literally, for the immense majority of the 

 persons who do not experience the phenomenon will not answer 

 the queries for many motives, the chief of which is a kind of 

 contempt for studies they do not comprehend. It is nevertheless 

 true that M. Claparede has collected, without great effort, two 

 hundred and five observations, and that that number, added to the 

 old observations, gives a total of nearly five hundred cases. Such 

 a mass of observations may well inspire some confidence. It may 

 be added that each of the authors who have written on the ques- 

 tion often has by him the observation of some friend in whom he 

 has entire confidence ; so that resistance to so many accumulated 

 proofs becomes no longer wisdom, or even skepticism, but sim- 

 plicity. 



