Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/842

822 number pronounced is more than the person can repeat exactly. I then ask him abruptly if he saw the numbers or heard them in his memory. Remark that this experiment appeals by its method wholly to the auditive memory. In nine cases out of ten, taking the subjects as they come, they will answer that they heard the numbers "in their ear," and had no idea of seeing them; or, if they saw them, it was by a confused, indirect mental vision. But those persons who have colored audition will answer that they saw the numbers. Although their auditive memory was excited by hearing, they transformed the auditive image of the number into a visual one; their attention was fixed on the form, the color—an excellent example of that tendency to transform everything into visions which seems to me to be the characteristic of colored audition.

This mental organization agrees in many of its characteristics, with that of the painter, the mark of whose vocation may be found, as M. Arréat has indicated in his La Psychologie du Peintre, in his sensitive-eye and his aptitude in appreciating, abstracting, and reproducing the brilliancy of colors and the harmony of forms, from which he acquires a habit of thinking with visual images. The natural gifts of the painter are, however, not all that is required for colored audition, but are only one of the psychological conditions of the phenomenon. A person capable of recollecting colors with their most delicate shadings might, by giving free course to his poetic imagination, color all the sounds that vibrate in his ear; but he would only arrive at intentional comparisons which he can make and unmake at will. The association in colored audition is very different; it is not sought for or selected; the subject does not invent it, he finds it already formed in his mind. He has only to hear a voice to have almost instantly the impression that that voice has a certain shade of color. Here we touch upon the fundamental characteristic of colored audition. Since it consists of an artificial and insurmountable association, it can not be regarded as a strictly physiological condition; it is a deviation, however insignificant we may suppose it to be, from the usual normal course of thought. Yet it generally coincides, according to the observations of the best authors, with a perfect state of physical and moral health, with perhaps a slight predominance of the nervous temperament in the majority of the subjects. The influence of heredity has been noticed several times. There have been as many as four or five cases in the same family, and considerable resemblance between the colored alphabets of relatives.

If the ultimate fundamental origin of colored audition is, as we beievebelieve [sic], in the organization of the individual, it remains to find the occasional cause that determines it and establishes a precise