Definition

1.312     G-1910-1

  312. One of the old Scotch psychologists, whether it was
Dugald Stewart or Reid ** or which other matters naught,
mentions, as strikingly exhibiting the disparateness of different
senses, that a certain man blind from birth asked of a person of
normal vision whether the color scarlet was not something like
the blare of a trumpet; and the philosopher evidently expects
his readers to laugh with him over the incongruity of the notion.
But what he really illuskates much more strikingly is the
dullness of apprehension of those who, like himself, had only the
conventional education of the eighteenth century and remained
wholly uncultivated in comparing ideas that in their matter

  * From "Definition," 1910.
  ** Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, ch. 6, sec. II. But cf. Locke's Essay,
bk. II, ch. 4, # 5.
|p156

are very unlike. For everybody who has acquired the degree of
susceptibility which is requisite in the more delicate branches
of reasoning -- those kinds of reasoning which our Scotch
psychologist would have labelled "Intuitions" with a strong
suspicion that they were delusions -- will recognize at once so
decided a likeness between a luminous and extremely
chromatic scarlet, like that of the iodide of mercury as commonly
sold under the name of scarlet [and the blare of a trumpet] that
I would almost hazard a guess that the form of the chemical
oscillations set up by this color in the observer will be found to
resemble that of the acoustical waves of the trumpet's blare.
I am only deterred from doing so by its being apparently true
that our sense of hearing is entirely analytic; so that we are
totally deaf to the wave of sound as it exists, and only hear the
harmonic components regardless of the phases at which
vibrations of commensurable lengths are combined.