Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/833

Rh 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 concerned 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 generation to another, and in different countries. The number of persons who say they have colored audition must be taken into consideration. According to Bleuler and Lehmann, it is twelve per cent. M. Claparède, of the University of Geneva, who is now investigating 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 proportion 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. Claparède 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 question 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 simplicity.