In many cases sensations or motor tendencies are noted all over the
body during the existence of these complex states. At such times
they are not recognized as referring to either feeling-tone in
particular. When also a favorite color is presented to a subject who
is experiencing a disagreeable feeling from sandpaper, the touch is so
pervasive usually that he feels that this "controls the whole response"
and inhibits any reaction, or even any suggested reaction to the
color. When there does fail to be even any possible incipient motor
suggestion, as a rule the feeling-tone for the object is extremely
vague if it exists at all, and the object appears for the time "dead"
or "valueless." Subjects speak of their own inability to respond
in such cases. It is not at all as if the color is definitely bad,
but rather as if one cannot do two different things with the same
muscular apparatus at once. As often, as has before been noted, does
the opposite occur. Colors in definitely characterized forms illustrate
the relations of similar activities when feeling-tones occur together.
Yellow is preferred in upright ovals, for both accentuate the same
demand for activity, and calling for the same kind of response, tend to
fuse into a single object. Yellow and plush do not harmonize, and in
many cases where both retain their feeling-tones, distinct activities
in different parts of the body are aroused simultaneously. With the
circles the feeling-tone for yellow does not agree with that for form.
The yellow becomes almost unpleasant at times. Circles are "heavy,"
"stable," "on their own axes." A yellow thus enclosed seems "too fat,"
too "unnaturally heavy," not free and light, and the effect is less
pleasing. Circles suit the red better than they do the yellow or the
green or the blue, and tend to be seen as one object, or to fuse, more
readily than red in an upright oval form. The feeling-tones for red and
for upright ovals are both very pleasant, but not as much in harmony,
and consequently usually taken as two different feelings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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