Abstract
DR.EDRIDGE-GREEX has been engaged for more than twenty years in advocating opinions about colour-blindness which he has not the gift of stating with extreme lucidity, which most people find it by no means easy to understand, and it is therefore somewhat difficult either to accept or to refute. The general basis on which the opinions rest appears to be his conception of something called by him a “psycho-physical unit,” by which he appears to mean the limit, in any individual, of the power to perceive actual difference between two things closely resembling one another, as, for example, between two similar colours, or between two masses of the same substance that are of nearly the same magnitude. There are, no doubt, great personal differences of this kind, differences which may be partly congenital and partly the results of training; but it does not appear to us that the prefix “psycho,” whatever it may mean, bears any intelligible relation to them. The differences are differences of the acute-ness of sense-perception, and, if we regard simple sense-perception, colour-perception, for example, as “psychical,” we must postulate the activity of a “psyche” in the humblest fly which is guided to the nectary of a flower by the colour of the corolla.
Colour-Blindness and Colour-Perception.
By Dr. F. W. Edridge-Green. Second edition. Pp. xii+322. International Scientific Series. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., 1909.) Price 5s.
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Colour-Blindness and Colour-Perception . Nature 84, 263 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084263a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084263a0