The experimental development of color-tone synesthesia.

The quality which has traditionally differentiated the psychologist from the unspoiled layman is his persistent endeavor to dissect experience. The classical psychology has commonly taken for granted that experience is an incidental or secondary product of varying combinations of discrete and independent sensations. On the other hand, the more modern, instrumental view tends increasingly to interpret all sensations and perceptions as incidental to the overall process of organic adjustment or achievement, and is inclined to suspect that all of the qualities and meanings of sensations and perceptions, the very origin, maintenance, and mode of discrimination of sensory components, depend in the long run upon how effectively they guide the total process of integration of the whole organism. The immediate world of the child is evidently quite unitary and undivided. Neither the child nor the animal is adept at analyzing his experience. On the other hand, the more sophisticated psychologist tends characteristically to departmentalize and classify his impressions of his environment. The first experimental psychologist was perchance some primordial boy who lay idly on his back and wondered at the marvelous changes which could be wrought in Nature, simply by opening and closing his eyes. As psychologists have done ever since, he perhaps conjectured that the complex experience which came and went as his eyelids moved was furnished solely by his eyes—in other words, the erreur de prejuge. He was probably quite naively certain that the peculiar shivery quality of the sight of white snow, for instance, was altogether optical, and ignored the possibility that many of its qualities were originally derived from his other senses. The boy saw the snow as cold and wet because very likely he had once felt that it was cold and wet at the