This device enables us at once to understand the consequence of mentally displacing the zero, while physically the scale remains unchanged. When red is the prevailing colour in the field of vision, we are inclined to consider it unduly pale; in other words we imagine it to be nearer the zero of the scale than is actually the case, and so are led to shift our standard of whiteness from the middle slightly towards the red end of the scale. The new position assigned to white, being a little to the right of the point marked 0 in Fig. 35, is one where, under customary circumstances, the colour would be called pale red. At the same time, an object which is normally white, and is exactly matched at the middle of the scale, would be a little to the left of the imaginary zero, and would consequently appear to be of a greenish-blue tint. This apparent transformation of white or grey into a decided colour is most striking when the inducing colour is considerably diluted with white or is of feeble luminosity. A small fragment of neutral grey paper, placed upon a much larger piece of a bright red hue, generally appears at the first glance[11] to be greenish-blue, but if the light is at all strong, only slightly so. If, however, a sheet of white tissue paper is laid over the whole, the greenish-blue tint immediately becomes startlingly distinct, and may even appear more decided than the red itself as seen through the tissue. The same piece of grey paper, when placed upon a green ground, appears rose-coloured, and upon a blue ground, yellow, the effect being always greatly increased by the diluent action of superposed tissue paper. There seem to be several reasons, partly physical and partly psychological, why these contrast colours, as they are called, are more pronounced when the colour that calls them into existence either has a somewhat pale tint or is feebly illuminated. Probably the most important is of a purely physical character. The refracting media of the eye are much less perfectly transparent than a good glass lens is; they are sensibly turbid or opalescent, and in consequence of this defect some of the light which falls upon them is irregularly scattered over the retina. If we look at a bright red object with a small white patch upon it, the image of the patch as formed upon the retina is not, physically speaking, perfectly white, but slightly coloured by diffused red light; owing however to the psychological influence to which our attention has been directed, the faint red coloration is not consciously perceived; the same mental displacement of the zero which, when the exciting colour was feeble, led us to regard white (or grey) as bluish-green, now causes what is actually pale red to appear white.