Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/839

Rh their vowels the idea of a different color—for example, gray—the discord appears shocking, and the subjects do not hesitate to declare the word ill-formed. A doctor, a friend of ours, to whom a (French) is red, finds also that the word feu (French for fire) is incorrect, because fire is red and the word feu has no a. A correspondent to whom colored audition 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 (écarlate) 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 examples, seem to us to indicate a tendency to give a real significance 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 manifested 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 mentioned 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 person 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 illusion 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. Claparède. 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 w 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;