Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/105

] ideas, such as those of number, of months, days of the week, proper names, etc. M. Flournoy discusses the data brought together by previous authors as well as by himself; and if the results are not very sharply denned, it is certainly not for lack of taking pains. 'Synopsy,' as the author calls it, is probably a little more frequent among women than men. Of his 371 positive cases, only one-third had both photisms and diagrams, one-fifth having diagrams alone, whilst nearly half had photisms alone. The phenomena are most frequent in childhood, and often fade out as life advances. Hardly any one unites all the possible classes of photism in his own person, nor is the intensity of the visual phenomenon in an individual proportioned to the number of stimuli which have the power of arousing it. The latter are called 'inducers' by M. Flournoy, the photism, diagram, or other visual concomitant being called the 'induct.' Inducts are not exclusively optical—e.g., for instance, the numeral quinze suggests in one subject the taste of wild strawberries in red wine, colors sometimes induce sounds when sounds do not induce colors, etc., but these other 'synæsthesias' are very rare in comparison with the 'synopsias' on which so much has been written. The most frequent synopsias are those induced by vowels. M. Flournoy himself has not met with any case of photism of sensational or hallucinatory intensity, though a fairly definite localization of them is not rare. Usually they are only inwardly imagined, or conceived, and M. Flournoy gives curious cases in which there is no inner image, however weak, and yet where the subject will, for example, affirm such things as that the vowel a corresponds quite definitely to a shade of blue which she picks out from a series of colored papers. Often the synoptic phenomenon becomes 'negative.' The subject, on being asked, perceives, for instance, that whatever color i may be, it is certainly not red. [The present writer has no photisms, and almost no visual images, but discovered, in reading M. F.'s book, that by a process of exclusion the vowel-sound ee (French i) seemed to have for him more affinity with emerald-green than with any other tint. It is entirely incongruous with blue, yellow, red, black, white, or brown.] Not only the sound, but the graphic sign, of the vowel is instrumental in the induction. The photism often consists of a vision of the printed letter, stained with, or surrounded by a halo of, its characteristic color. Sometimes it makes a difference how one imagines the sound to be written. The photism, e.g., of French ou may differ from the same individual's photism of German u, though the sounds are the same. The