ility to recognise or
identify a colour after having seen it once. 3. An association between
the child's colour seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by
which the proper name for the colours is brought up in his mind. 4.
Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various names of
the colours which he recognises; and there is the further
embarrassment, that any such process which involves association of
ideas, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that
speech is acquired long after objects and some colours are
distinguished, shows that results reached by this method have very
little value as far as the problem of the first perception of colours
is concerned.

That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of
confusion is shown by the fact that children recognise many words
which they can not readily pronounce. When this was realized, a
second phase in the development of the problem arose. A colour was
named, and then the child was required to pick out that colour. This
gave results different from those reached by the first method, blue
and red leading the list in correct answers by the first method, while
by this second method yellow led, and blue came near the end of the
list.

The further objection that colours might be distinguished before the
word names are learned, or that colour words might be interchanged or
confused by the child, gave rise to what we may call the third stage
in the statement of the problem. The method of "recognition" took the
place of the method of "naming." This consisted in showing to a child
a coloured disk, without naming it, and then asking him to pick out
the same colour from a number of coloured disks.

This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named
above. It is the usual method of testing for colour blindness, in
which, from defects of vision, certain colours can not be perceived at
all. It answers very well for colour blindness; for what we really
want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signal-man is whether he
can recognise a given signal when it is repeated; that is, does he
know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or
red? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question
in the matter--the real question of colour perception. It is quite
possible that a child might not recognise an isolated colour when he
could really very well distinguish the colours lying side by side. Th