We can most of us perhaps, recall similar experiences, where colours and sounds, in themselves indifferent, took on either through analogy or association a decidedly repulsive character. How far, one wonders, does this process of transformation of things go in the case of imaginative children? There is some reason to say that it may go very far, and that, too, when there is no strong feeling at work cementing the combined elements. A child’s feeling for likeness is commonly keen and subtle, and knowledge of the real relations of things has not yet come to check the impulse to this free far-ranging kind of assimilation. Before the qualities and the connexions of objects are sufficiently known for them to be interesting in themselves, they can only acquire interest through the combining art of childish fancy. And the same is true of associated qualities. A child’s ear may not dislike a grating sound, a harsh noise, as our ear dislikes it, merely because of its effect on the sensitive organ. _En revanche_ it will like and dislike sounds for a hundred reasons unknown to us, just because the quick strong fancy adding its life to that of the senses gives to their impressions much of their significance and much of their effect. There is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over the things of sense. It is well known that a certain number of people habitually ‘colour’ the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the sound of a vowel, or of a musical tone, to have its characteristic tint which they are able to describe accurately. This ‘coloured hearing,’ as it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. Children are now beginning to be tested and it is found that a good proportion possess the faculty. Thus, in some researches on the minds of Boston school-children, it was found that twenty-one out of fifty-three, or nearly 40 per cent., described the tones of certain instruments as coloured.[16] The particular colour ascribed to an instrument, as also the degree of its brightness, though remaining constant in the case of the same child, varied greatly among different children, so that, for example, one child ‘visualised’ the tone of a fife as pale or bright, while another imaged it as dark.[17] It is highly probable that both analogy and association play a part here.[18] As was recently suggested to me by a correspondent the instance given by Locke of the analogy between scarlet and the note of a trumpet may easily be due in part at least to association of the tone with the scarlet uniform. ----- Footnote 16: See the article by G. Stanley Hall, “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” _Princeton Review_. New Series, 1883. _Cf._ the same writer’s volume, _The Contents of Children’s Minds on entering School_, 1894. ----- Footnote 17: _Ibid._, p. 265. Footnote 18: