Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/106

90 presence of the inducing-vowel in the name of the color (as ee, above, in green) seems not a very important determinant of what the color shall be. M. Flournoy goes through a laborious discussion of all the varieties of alphabetic synopsia in his collection, and finds that there are hardly any general laws: so many men, so many combinations. In only two persons out of 250 were the colors of five vowels the same. One group of three persons had four vowel-colors the same, and four vowel-colors were the same in ten different pairs of persons. The word 'idiosyncracy' is the most convenient name to attach to such facts.

Voices and musical sounds induce visual representations more rarely than letters of the alphabet; odors of flowers more rarely still. Proper names and geographical names often have distinct color-affinities, which do not seem due to those of the constituent vowels of the words. Days of the week and months of the year appear in distinct color and form, which, M. Flournoy thinks, may often be residual effects of some faded-out original symbolic personification of the day or month in question. Red is the color most often induced, if one takes a summary view of all the colored images presented. Into the long list of diagrams and schemes which our author figures, describes, and discusses, we will not follow him, it being a tangle of detail in which one cannot see the forest for the trees. The chapter of personifications, by which one gives a sex or a moral character to the various numbers, as for example, when one represents the letter a as gay, i as conceited, etc., or thinks of Mardi and Mars as a dish of scrambled eggs, is more entertaining reading. Under the head of 'photisms of sympathy' a case is described in which spontaneously there appeared to the subject a violet halo (violet being to him a hateful color) about the head of persons who struck him unfavorably, and whilst pink or red rays appear streaming from the head and eyes of 'sympathetic' persons.

On the whole, M. Flournoy finds the photisms, symbols, personifications, etc., to be rather disadvantageous than otherwise to the mental operations of their possessors. They often complain of them as an interference or a distraction. Number-diagrams and other schemata, on the contrary, are probably rather useful. They give intuitive clearness to abstract relations, and, like all definite associates, help to fix in our memory the objects which evoke them. They are, however, far from being necessary, and possibly in the more abstract thought-operations they may even be a hindrance,—