Colors and Their Character: A Psychological Study (1949)

In everyday life there does not seem to be anything unusual in speaking of the "character" of colors. We may speak of a delicate blue, a vivid red, a lively yellow, a naive green. Colors mean something to us; they have a kind of personality, more or less to be compared with the human personality. The ancient Egyptian word wn for "color" later came to mean also the character of a living being (8z, 414). Mantegazza even speaks of the "soul" of a color. A fine example of the intensity with which colors may be experienced is the following quotation from Sartre (204, 25). An artist coming from a cafe enters the sunlit street: "toutes les couleurs s'etaient allumees en meme temps et lui faisaient fete, comme en 29, c'etait le bal de la Redoute, le Camaval, la Fan- tasia; les gens et les obj ets s' etaient congestionnes; le violet d'une robe se viola