Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/837

Rh In colored audition there is no double perception, nor what is called a synæsthesia. All takes place in the imagination of the subject; the impressions of color of which he is conscious on the hearing of certain vowels are not real sensations; they are not colors which one sees with the eyes, but mental images, notions, or we might better compare them with the images which the natural significance of the words excites in the mind. We must insist upon this important and too often misinterpreted point. In order to give a basis to our interpretation, we shall relate some of the facts we have collected with Prof. Beaunis in the Laboratory of Psychology of the Sorbonne; we shall not introduce the detail of the observations, but shall only take the general sense.

To a certain distinguished doctor a is red, and is the only vowel which appears to him in color. He has colored it spontaneously from infancy, before having read what was written on the question. The other vowels were not colored till a later age. He is suspicious of the later colorations, and believes that they are fictitious, suggested by reading. Now, what meaning shall we attribute to his expression, so clear in itself, "A is red"? Does he mean that when he sees the letter a written with a pen on a white sheet of paper, or with chalk on a black tablet, or when that vowel is pronounced in his presence, he has the subjective impression of a red spot which hovers before his eyes, on surrounding objects? In other words, is there a hallucination of sight? In no wise. Still less is there the pretended and incomprehensive seeing of the sound in red. He has the idea of red, and nothing more. It is an idea and not a sensation. According to his own expressions, he receives the same suggestion when he meets in any phrase the word red. Hear, for example, a person who is telling us of some judicial ceremony. In the midst of his story appears the phrase, "Then I saw the procurator rise in a red robe." We have immediately an internal vision of something red—a vision clear, detailed, vivid for some, confused for others. It is a like impression that the letter a gives our subject; in short, a simple idea. Let us add that the idea is not very clear; the subject can not define the shade of red that appears to him, still less represent it in real colors, even if he knows how to mix colors and is an amateur painter; it is some kind of a red—unprecise.

If we suppose, now, that all the vowels give rise to suggestions of a similar character, our description will be adapted to a majority of subjects; it will exactly represent their mental state. This mental state is characterized by the direction of the thought toward colors and shades. Each word that presents itself, whether to the eyes in reading, or to the ear in listening, or in a mental conception, gives complex ideas of color. These ideas serve as an escort to the word, accompanying it constantly, and are a