THE PROBLEM OF COLORED AUDITLON. 819 



their vowels the idea of a different color — for example, gray — the 

 discord appears shocking, and the subjects do not hesitate to de- 

 clare the word ill-formed. A doctor, a friend of ours, to whom a 

 (French) is red, finds also that the word/eit (French for fire) is in- 

 correct, because fire is red and the word feu has no a. A corre- 

 spondent to whom colored andition is a multicolored palette makes 

 similar remarks on the contradictions or confirmations which he 

 finds between words and their colors. To him a's are red, as to 

 the doctor ; hence he finds that red (rouge) is ill-named, and that 

 the word fire (feu) is " that which is dullest " ; scarlet (ecarlate) is, 

 on the other hand, quite imitative. I is black and o is white ; 

 whence it results that the word noir (black) is white and black; 

 to pronounce the words moire rouge is to think of a contradiction. 

 These plays with words, of which we might cite numerous ex- 

 amples, seem to us to indicate a tendency to give a real signifi- 

 cance to associations of sound and color, as if they expressed a 

 truth to which language ought to conform. But the subjects are 

 too intelligent to affirm this ; they simply yield to the sway of 

 thought, without being aware of it. 



There are other persons in whom the same tendency is mani- 

 fested in a clearer and more simple way. They believe in good 

 faith that certain things they have never seen have precisely 

 the color of the word by which they are named. We have men- 

 tioned Bleuler, for example, who thought the ketones were yellow, 

 because of the o in the name, to which he attributed that color. 

 Observations of this kind need not be enlarged upon. For a per- 

 son to believe that a thing is red because there are red vowels in 

 its name, he must not be acquainted with its real color, and must 

 not be aware of his faculty of coloring the vowels ; for the illu- 

 sion will disappear as soon as he perceives that the supposed 

 color depends on the word. These are probably the conditions 

 of the following observation of which I have been informed by 

 M. Claparede. A person fifty-two years old wrote to him : " I 

 still remember the astonishment I felt at the age of sixteen years 

 when I saw sulphuric acid for the first time. I had previously 

 read an account of that substance in a work of popular science, 

 and had fancied it an opaque liquid, having the appearance of 

 tarnished lead. I was then not yet conscious of my colored vision 

 of the vowels. Later in life I explained my fancy as related to 

 the two u's in the word sulphuric." This person saw i as black, 

 and u as a lusterless metallic gray. 



The same tendency, but with a very different effect, appears 

 in a lady observed by M. Suarez de Mendoza, who attributes a 

 special color to each piece of music and each score. The music 

 of Haydn appears to her of a disagreeable green ; that of Mozart, 

 generally blue; Chopin's is distinguished by much yellow; 



