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Colour is largely assumed to be already in the world, a natural universal
that everyone, everywhere understands. Yet cognitive scientists routinely
tell us that colour is an illusion, and a private one for each of us; neither

Young
social nor material, it is held to be a product of individual brains and eyes
rather than an aspect of things.
This collection seeks to challenge these assumptions and examine
their far-reaching consequences, arguing that colour is about practical R e m a t e r i a l i z i n g
Colour
involvement in the world, not a finalized set of theories, and getting to
know colour is relative to the situation one is in – both ecologically and
environmentally. Specialists from the fields of anthropology, psychology,
cinematography, art history and linguistics explore the depths of colour
in relation to light and movement, memory and landscape, language and
narrative, in case studies with an emphasis on Australian First Peoples, but
ranging as far afield as Russia and First Nations in British Columbia. What
becomes apparent, is not only the complex but important role of colours in

Rematerializing colour
socializing the world; but also that the concept of colour only exists in some
times and cultures. It should not be forgotten that the Munsell Chart, with
its construction of colours as mathematical coordinates of hues, value and
chroma, is not an abstraction of universals, as often claimed, but is itself a
cultural artefact.
This is a very beautiful book, replete with the insightful essays that
the topic demands. It will change the way you think about colour.

From Concept
In a brilliant paradox, it challenges the very existence of colours
only to bring colour back into the centre of human lives. This
volume weaves an argument that cuts across history, art and time.

to Substance
 Howard Morphy, Distinguished Professor,
 Australian National University College of Arts & Social Sciences

Rematerializing Colour leaves any understanding of colour as

an add-on or surface phenomenon behind. Embracing colours
as dynamic, transformative materialities inherent to a multitude
of experiences, environments and things, and to the formation of
subjectivities and collective identities, contributors’ essays are
centred upon colours’ mutable, palpable, excessive and affectively
charged capacities and effects.
 Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology & Sociology,
 The Graduate Institute Geneva
Diana Young is Director of the Masters in Museum Studies Programme
at the University of Queensland. She was Director of the University of
Queensland Anthropology Museum for eight years.

Edited by Diana Young

Cover image:
Grand Prismatic Springs,
photo C. Greenhalgh
Rematerializing Colour
 First published in 2018 by
Sean Kingston Publishing
www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon

Editorial selection and introduction © 2018 Diana Young

Individual chapters © 2018 Jennifer L. Biddle, Alan Costall, Jennifer Deger,
Mary Eagle, Cathy Greenhalgh, Barbara Saunders, Peter Sutton and
Michael Snow, Luke Taylor, Anna Wierzbicka, Diana Young

Thank you to Peter Sutton and to Jennifer Deger for their contribution to
the colour printing of this volume.

Thanks to Sarah Webb.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any
means without the written permission of Sean Kingston Publishing.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The moral rights of the authors are asserted.

Ebook ISBN 978-1-912385-13-3

Rematerializing colour

From concept to substance

Edited by Diana Young

Sean Kingston Publishing

www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon
 C o ntents

Introduction Diana Young 1

Chapter 1 Does colour matter? 23

An affordance perspective
Alan Costall

Chapter 2 Pink cake, red eyes, coloured photos 45

Desire, loss and Aboriginal aesthetics in
northern Australia
Jennifer Deger

Chapter 3 How much longer can the Berlin and Kay 67

paradigm dominate visual semantics?
English, Russian and Warlpiri seen
from the native’s point of view
Anna Wierzbicka

Chapter 4 Cinematographic encounters with 91

natural-light colour
Cathy Greenhalgh

Chapter 5 Iridescence 121

Peter Sutton and Michael Snow

Chapter 6 Colour as the edge of the body 145

Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert
Diana Young

Chapter 7 The role of colour in a period when 165

cultures crossed
Paintings from Central Australia from the
1930s to 1980
Mary Eagle
Chapter 8 Notes on the hapticity of colour 193
Jennifer L. Biddle

Chapter 9 Paint as power among Kuninjku artists 211

Luke Taylor

Chapter 10 Problems translating colour terms 231

Barbara Saunders

Contributors 254

Index 257
Figures 1 and 2 Somerset House pop up ice rink, London December 2017. LED
coloured light show. Photo Cathy Greenhalgh.
 Introduction
Diana Young

This is a book about colour as a primary aspect of things. What can

we learn if we give colour this respect? In the following essays, colours
are materialized as cake icing, railway signals, gravestones, clothing,
landscapes and atmospheres, paintings, film and photographs. The colours
are ‘re-materialized’ because as material stuff they are part of our everyday
lives and not merely the mental concept ‘colour’, an idea that belongs to
post-Enlightenment European cultures.
This is also a book about the socialness of colours. Attaching colour to
culture refigures it as part of human society relevant to political economy
and aesthetics (Gage 1993; Pinney 2006). Colour can swiftly travel from
being merely a consumer choice to a fundamental idea about ordering and
classifying the world. Investigating the concept of colour leads to some
other key concepts: universality and relativity, cognition, classification,
agency and the vitality of things, the colonialism of ideas, the dynamic
interaction of people and environment, of subjects and objects. Colour in
the singular often refers to the concept of colour, and colours in the plural
to practices and substances (Batchelor 2008).
Over recent years materiality has become important theoretically
in anthropology. Cultural theories about things promise that the
relationships between people and things (subjects and objects) are central
to understanding cosmology, power and multiple facets of a society (Miller
2005). Things have qualities that they bring to bear on humans. One of the
purposes of this book is to ask what coloured materials do.
It is not novel to write about colour as materialized. There are a
multitude of books on colour already in the world. The majority are
practical manuals aimed at the consumer, and they provide tips on
colouring your home, choosing assemblages of colour in your clothing,
2 Introduction

the distribution and temporality of colour in your garden planting. There

are many boring books about colours (Taussig 2009:244). Efforts towards
Bordieuian distinction, most of these books are about the control of colour,
colour as a tool for social engineering, and they succeed earlier generations
of craftsman manuals written for, or by, painters and dyers. Today there are
also many books and web pages on the application of colour in Photoshop.
There are digital, ready-made palettes of colour. As colour plays a vital
role in marketing there are books and websites about colour in corporate
branding. All this assumes that colour is natural, a universal that everyone,
everywhere understands.

What is colour?
What, though, is ‘colour’? How can we know what it is? Are colours
ontological, that is, about being. Are colours epistemological, about
knowledge? The contributors to this book discuss some of these questions
and provide some culturally specific case studies of colour. Such studies
of colour can help tell us what it might be. We cannot speak any longer
of cultures as bounded ontologies but of ethnographies of colour –
ethnographies of colour events or as a set of practices – that might show
something of the porosity of colour.
Despite the amount of colour in the contemporary world and the
resurgence of interest in colour discourse, the very concept of ‘colour’ itself
is too often left unproblematized. In his contribution, Costall (this volume)
discusses how colour scientists routinely tell us that colour is an illusion,
and a private one for each of us. In this assumed paradigm, we think
surfaces are coloured, but really they are not. Colour is neither social nor
material; instead, it is a product of individual brains and eyes and not an
aspect of things. Hence colour is deemed a mere secondary quality.
Costall argues against this orthodoxy, following the American
psychologist James Gibson. Colour is about practical involvement in
the world, not a set of finalized theories. Costall cites Gibson’s classic
point about the horizon, which ‘expresses the reciprocity of observer and
environment’ (Gibson 1979:164) and is neither inside us nor outside us; the
horizon moves as we move. Colour is, in Gibson’s terms, an ‘affordance’.
Affordances, he says, ‘are ecological, in the sense that they are properties
of the environment relative to an animal’ (Gibson 1982:407–8, original
emphasis).
Introduction 3

Qualities compose things rather than things being made up of

qualities, argues Gibson. According to this argument, which Costall
explores, colour is part of things, not a quality that is added to them.
Costall cites the apposite example of archaeology students negotiating the
classification of soil samples using the Munsell chart, an act illustrating, he
says, the spurious opposition between the mental and the material, as such
a negotiation is both social and practical.
Costall’s contribution is crucial to this book because he sets out how
getting to know colour is relative to the situation one is in – ecologically
and environmentally. Material colours are part of the qualities that
create the world. This ecology of material colours is explored in the
anthropological case studies of social and cultural colours in other chapters
in this book. Six of these are about Australia, where land – ‘country’ – has
always been a cultural, intensely spiritual environment for Aboriginal
people. Expressions of the affective dimensions of country and access to
knowledge about specific places through coloured things and images are
the subjects of several case studies presented here.

Colour constrained
Almost everyone in Euro-American history who has been an advocate
of colour has been unable to resist classifying it and creating rules
for its application (Batchelor 2001:48). Colours were systematized for
reproduction to industry standards, mobilizing a mid-twentieth-century
‘colour revolution’ of multiple-coloured materials. The United States
developed colour as a consumption tool to stimulate sales, although
the inventors of the new colour technology were in the UK, France and
Germany (Ball 2003; Taussig 2009). The knowledge gained in military
camouflage techniques, for example, was transferred to the automobile
industry (Blaszczyk 2012).
The Munsell chart was the dominant means of controlling colour
in the twentieth century. The notion that human perception is within
the human body (an a priori given) was influential on art educationalist
Alfred Munsell. In this view, colours are really only in wavelengths of light,
not properties of things, and the human perceptual apparatus creates the
sensation of colour. Munsell’s aim was to prevent the tawdry new synthetic
dyestuffs being used willy-nilly by the populace. Colour was a human urge
that must be controlled. During the early decades of the twentieth century,
he set about devising a system of control and comparison for colour
4 Introduction

by constructing colours as mathematical coordinates of hue, value and

chroma, variables which codify a ‘colour space’. Hue concerns the category
of colour, say red or green; value concerns the lightness of a colour; and
chroma is the saturation of a colour. As Saunders (this volume) explains,
Munsell’s chart has become naturalized in Western culture. We have
forgotten that it is a cultural artefact.
The invention of new, quick-drying and easily applied acrylic paints,
which became available after the Second World War in a constellation
of colours, was a crucial part of the do-it-yourself phenomenon
(Blaszczyk 2012:255). Colour had become a ready-made feature (Batchelor
2000). In the past, colour was mostly fleeting – in the land and sky, and in
unstable dyestuffs and pigments – though the labour involved in making
reds or indigos was intense. Aniline dyes and, later, shop-bought paints
contained colour that could defy time or at least slow it down.
During the Second World War colours were used to distinguish
different kinds of bombs (ibid.:226). Here is a sound functional use for
colours. Colour blindness, as Costall (this volume) points out, can have
grievous consequences. This distinguishing attribute of colour is basic,
functional, reductionist even, but also a form of critically important
socially shared knowledge.

Colouring the world

Colours are an intrinsic feature of the social environment. Through sheer
scale, the highest impact of coloured things is environmental: the pulsating
acidic colours of neon lights now succeeded by light-emitting diodes
(LED), fireworks, large-scale digital advertising hoardings, the cladding of
buildings and the labile hues of earth and sky, the highly chromatic mass-
planting of crops such as oil-seed rape or poppies, red earth, green grass.
Albanian artist Anri Sala made a short film, Dammi i colori/Give me
the colours, about the transformation effected with brightly coloured paints
on the buildings of the Albanian capital Tirana (Sala 2003). The idea for
this urban transformation came from the then mayor of that city (and
later prime minister of Albania), an artist named Edi Rama, who explains
in the film that here colours replace the organs of the city, whereas, in
a city that developed naturally, colours would be like a dress or lipstick.
To construe colours as the very generative life force of a city, as I think
the mayor implies, is an inversion of the depth ontology conventionally
associated with colour in European cultures, where colours are merely
Introduction 5

Figure 3 ANRI SALA, Dammi i colori, 2003. Video on DVD, 15’ 24”. Courtesy of
the artist; Chantal Crousel, Paris; Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Zurich and Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York.

surface applications. The mayor was aiming to dispense with expectations

of colour as superficial and peripheral yet at the same time, as the colours
used got brighter, as unruly, sensual, childish and primitive, and instead
offer colours as redemptive and the means to create a gateway to a hopeful
future.
As Rama explicates to the camera, in post-communist Albania the
transformation of Tirana’s buildings is not a reflection of democratization
but a process that travels with it, a visible joyous transformation after years
of the suppression of the individual. At first there was resistance to the use
of colours by locals, then fierce debates arose about the colours and finally
those who had not had their building painted demanded that theirs be
included. A French European Union bureaucrat remarked that the colours
– a brilliant orange in particular – did not meet European standards.
‘Compromise in colours is grey’, Rama reports that he replied (Rama 2013).
The application of colours to the communist-era concrete-grey
buildings of Tirana not only effects the way people feel and move, somehow
6 Introduction

liberating them, as Rama implies, but endows the landscape with a fourth
dimension. The buildings too seem to move, their spatial relationships
reconfigured by their brilliant colours.
Sala’s film is relevant to this book in many ways. The transformational
aspect of colour is one of its powerful aspects. The bold Tirana experiment
plays against the stereotype of Europe as chromophobic, to use Batchelor’s
apt phrase (Batchelor 2000). Through its sheer scale, the ambition of the
transformation is amazing.
Colours transform things and the relationships between them (Young
2011). It is unusual to find the dynamism and reconfiguration of visual
relationships that colours enable in European cultures, where colours
are reserved for special application in measured doses. An ethnography
of colour across a social event or milieu is rare, and Sala’s film attempts
it. Evoking a landscape through a group of colours is a recurring theme
among many of the chapters in this book, including those by Deger, Taylor,
Biddle, Eagle and Young, all writing about Indigenous Australia.
Another theme in this book, recurring implicitly and explicitly in
these same chapters, is the idea of a palette – the European painter’s
mixing board for a selected group of colours. Greenhalgh (this volume)
conjures the closed colour universe of the cinematographer’s colour
palette. Greenhalgh discusses the importance of the chromatic locale
to cinematography. Sala’s take on artist-mayor Rama as a performer, a
conjuror who provides commentary on the transformation of Tirana with
colours, is also an extreme example of a hyper-coloured cinematic palette.
The transformation of Tirana using coloured paint is part of a wider
return to chromatic brightness in contemporary architecture, seen last
in the 1980s ‘postmodern’ turn when Ettore Sottsass founded Memphis
Design and applied decorative pastel colours against the hitherto strict
functionalism of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture. Innovations
in building materials for exterior cladding have provided the potential
for bright colours. Highly chromatic edifices have appeared in many
urban-scapes, and coloured glass has returned as a desirable architectural
feature. Here are a few high profile European examples: Renzo Piano’s new
building in central London, deemed ‘gaudy’ by one critic (Moore 2009);
Herzog and de Meuron’s influential Laban Dance Centre in east London,
completed in 2003, is clad in coloured panels that endowed the structure
with a sense of movement and light, alluding to the activities that it houses;
Jean Nouvel’s monochromatic red pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in
Introduction 7

2010 created a complementary relationship with the bright green grass

of London’s Hyde Park (Merrick 2010). The latter temporary structure
followed Nouvel’s earlier Quai Branly (a new building for collections
previously housed in the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie
and the Musée de l’Homme), clad in panels of various red hues and set
in lush green landscaping, a building that has served to cleverly reinvent
an old ethnographic museum. Green is roughly the ‘opposite’ of red in
European colour theory. The two colours together create an impression
of vibrancy as such ‘opposite’ hues do.1 If you painted your own house in
this highly hued way, in the UK say, its market value would be substantially
compromised, whereas in an Indigenous village in the Western Desert
of Australia the opposite effect might apply – at least in terms of social
capital. There are social and cultural constraints about what you can and
cannot do with colour. What was successful in Albania as a turning point
in its history might not be greeted gleefully elsewhere.
The plethora of pigments yielded through industrial processes over
the last 150 years has made colour a taken-for-granted facet of consumer
goods that has also become a marker of democracy, making colour a potent
marketing tool (Shove et al.( 2007). Neutral colour is the commodity look
(Young 2004), certainly in Australia and the UK. Cars too have become
emptied out of their particularity. Neutral finishes that are more easily and
economically repaired superseded the new bright car paints of the 1960s
and 1970s.
More recently, colour as light, more specifically LED light, is being
used to transform buildings, effecting a re-presencing after dark of the
unremarkable facades of public buildings. Coloured light spectacles where
specially designed moving art works are projected onto buildings are
becoming part of metropolitan life, such as in Sydney, with its annual Vivid
festival, which bathes public buildings in multi-coloured media. Elusive,
emotive and capricious colours provide the capacity to re-enchant a world
leached of poetry. Despite this recent chromatic success, colour, whether
as paint or as impermanent coloured light, is still ‘detached from the
master narrative of architecture’ (Batchelor 2000:47; see also Wigley 1995).

1 Opposite colours are part of the human bodily response to colour through
‘after images’. Stare at a saturated red for 30 seconds or so and then shut your
eyes: the ‘opposite’ colour will appear.
8 Introduction

Writing colour
Colour is reappearing as a subject in academic discourse. Due to the
dominant model of colour perception as a process that takes place in
individual brains, it has been especially hard for social scientists to accept
colour as a topic worthy of study because the subject seems not only
frivolous but asocial. Symbolism is useful for making colours social – the
fate of colours in the social sciences (Young 2006).
The permeation of anthropological theories such as Appadurai’s ‘social
life of things’ (Appadurai 1986) and Kopytoff ’s ‘cultural biography of things’
(Kopytoff 1986) has also facilitated histories told through the movement
of things, an idea that has underpinned, since the turn of the century,
popular bestsellers. There are books detailing the European histories
of single colours, such as blue (Pastoureau 2001) and the synthetic and
revolutionary mauve (e.g. Garfield 2002). The rise of a new anthropology
of art and material culture theory in the last decades of the twentieth
century, especially in the UK and America, has enabled a new approach
to colour, considerably aided by Alfred Gell’s work on the enchantment
of technology and the agency of art objects, in which Gell aimed to find
specifically anthropological theories about art (Gell 1992, 1998). Gell was
interested in the cognitive ‘stickiness’ of pattern, the way that patterns
ensnare the eye (Gell 1998), an idea that has offered opportunities to other
scholars to once again investigate the line, and by default, as Batchelor puts
it, there is ‘the subjugation of colour to its rule’ despite the properties of
each to increase spatial and social connectivity (Batchelor 2000:49; see also
Ingold 2007; Were 2010). Colour creates desire: not just ‘I want that colour’
but the desire to possess multiples of otherwise identical things. It gives
things that are in a commodity phase glamour and ‘oomph’ (Thrift 2010).
Colour is captivating and enchanting. Single hues are, by and large, what
Western cultures of modernity want, and single hues are not enchanting.
Art historians have also been neglectful of colour. The primacy of the
line was correlated with the primacy of the intellect; designo, the drawing
of form, always preceded colour, colore. The art historian John Gage had
the study of colour more or less to himself during the 1990s, publishing
several encyclopaedic books on the history of colour (as opposed to the
colour of history) with an emphasis on Western art (Gage 1993, 1999).
The new study of material culture offered a way out of the
anthropological impasse that treated colour as a code, as only symbolic,
standing mechanically for some meaning separate from its chromatic
Introduction 9

surface. Colour can become an active agent, in Gell’s terms, so that

coloured objects can appear animated, acquiring a vitality that fits them
as subjects rather than objects (Young 2006), something that connects
with the Australian case studies discussed in this book. These share the
identification of colours as spiritual but just how colours are conceived of
like this differs in each case study. Taussig speculated upon the numinous
qualities of colours in his book What Color is the Sacred?(Taussig 2009).
The use of colour to express intense spiritual cleaving to the land
is evident in the Australian case studies presented here. Colour is one
way of creating vibrancy in things, making those things come alive.
The philosopher Jane Bennett (2010) has explored the vitality of matter,
renewing an approach last promulgated in the early twentieth century. Her
approach is not about colour per se but it opened up new possibilities for
colour studies.

Colour as colonialism
Europe’s modernity, allied with its empire and ‘the nightmare of “tradition”
that modernity creates’ (Chakrabarty 1992:23), is especially relevant to
the hunter-gatherer societies of Australia and Canada. The assumption by
outsiders of a cultural stasis among those who are not ‘modern’ is used as
evidence of Indigenous authenticity. ‘Colour’ was purveyed as a part of the
colonizer’s modernity just as much as, but less obviously than, the colonial
imposition of ‘time’. ‘Traditional’ colour is an oxymoron and a sleight of
hand. Colour was not necessarily a part of tradition, and tradition itself
only appears through modernity.
Only in the practice of art made for the market has colour become
visible. The amount of writing about Indigenous art practices testifies to
this, but even so only recently has colour appeared in such texts (Ryan
2004; Young 2011).
Do colonially imported coloured materials precede the linguistic
appearance of English colour words? It is likely that they do. If ‘colour’ is a
concept that we have and they do not, how does this idea of colour become
reimagined by colonial subjects? As Wierzbicka, Saunders and Young
argue in their contributions, colour itself is a colonial concept that was
exported to the colonies, where it was transformed again. In Batchelor’s
terms, chromophobia and chromophilia are not the inverse of one another
but part of the same scale that frames colour always as an otherness
(Batchelor 2000:71). In trying to understand societies newly accustomed to
10 Introduction

‘colours’, there must be no assumption that the trajectory of the West need
be emulated. Rather, the essays in this book recount aspects of practices
employing colours that form a history of European ‘colours’ reimagined
by Aboriginal people. Colour socializes their world, something especially
evident in the contributions of Deger and Young.

Colour naming and its influence

The literature problematizing colour as a concept has impeded thinking
about colours as material. In their contributions to this book, Costall,
Wierzbicka and Saunders each examine the concept of ‘colour’ and argue
that colour awareness is socially cultivated. Each of these authors has made
major contributions to challenging the status quo in what be might loosely
called colour studies.
In 1969, Berlin and Kay, cognitive anthropologists based at Berkeley,
published their highly influential work on colour terms (Berlin and Kay
1969). They defined colour terms as abstract names unrelated to specific
things. Languages with terms for only black and white were, they argued,
the most basic, followed by languages that included a term for red, then
yellow and green, then blue, which seemed sometimes to be mixed with
green, allowing them to coin ‘grue’ as a composite term. The full series
of colours embraced eleven terms that only Indo-European languages
possess.
Wierzbicka compares English and Russian colour terms, and uses these
to analyse Berlin and Kay’s theory of colour naming. She demonstrates
that if the idea that ‘blue’ is a universal given, but only English speakers
understand this correctly, such universality must be ethnocentric. Those
languages that have no word for ‘colour’ have no ‘colour words’ either,
because the concept does not exist there. With the spread of English
through colonization, ‘colour’ emerges, argues Wierzbicka. Just as in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when material culture was
chosen as a means to evaluate the sophistication of colonized societies,
similar criteria were also applied to colour recognition.
In her contribution, Saunders notes that her view of ‘colour’ was
radicalized by her experience working with the Kwakwaka’wakw, an
Indigenous people of Canada’s North-West Coast where Franz Boas did
his fieldwork. When she administers a colour recognition test based on the
Munsell chart, her consultants cannot answer. In Berlin and Kay’s view, the
Introduction 11

Munsell chart stands as universal and neutral, value free, a means to test
the subject’s evolutionary stage of ‘colour’, argues Saunders.
Berlin and Kay’s subsequent modification to their original research
was based around the yellow–green–blue category (Berlin and Kay 1991).
In her chapter, Saunders traces the work of Franz Boas in documenting
yellow–green–blue in the languages of North-West Coast peoples.
Saunders’s research reveals that, before colonial contact, language
terms for the qualities of things were about becoming, movement and
flexible patterns of relations. This talk was not hue-based at all. This is
a similar way of evaluating the mutable qualities of things to that of the
Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people of Australia, with whom Young
has worked (Young 2011, and this volume). When Saunders asked her
consultants to map ‘redness’, ‘blueness’, ‘greyness’ and so forth on the
Munsell chart, a pattern of relationships could not appear. Despite Boas’s
reputation as a cultural relativist, Saunders argues powerfully that, as Boas
complied grammars and dictionaries over a thirty-year period, he purified
composite terms into translations of European colour names. Similarly,
Wierzbicka’s demonstration of translations from Warlpiri into English
reveals assumptions about ‘colour’ made by translators into English.

Aboriginal Australians and the animation of colour

Anthropology in Australia is yet to break out of its predilection for material
culture theory as applicable only to museums. Writing about colour in
Australia Aboriginal societies has been most often confined to art historical
discussions without any accompanying analysis or problematizing of
colour’s role (e.g. Bowdler 2009; Ryan 2004). Anthropologists writing
about Aboriginal art have generally eschewed colour as a meaningful
aspect of their analyses with some exceptions, which I discuss below. Yet
the country that Aboriginal people own and continue to inhabit is often
highly chromatic and labile, and colours provide the means to express their
intense and energetic spiritual connections to it. The repainting of Tirana
would be, I hazard, a very attractive idea for Western Desert people, at least
if applied to their own built environment.
As Saunders has argued for Canadian peoples of the North-West
Coast, Young has argued that there was no concept of colour before
colonial contact among Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people)
(Young 2001, 2011). Young learnt from Anangu that they saw new coloured
things as a way to enhance the socialization of their world (Young 2006).
12 Introduction

Young uses the writing of other material culture theorists to argue that,
following colonial contact, colour acted like a novel material. Highly
chromatic and mutable aspects of country are a crucial aspect of people’s
intensely felt social and cultural affinities with it. Broken colour surfaces –
slithers, dots, lines, patterns of many colours – are continually reinvented
in, for example, peoples’ clothing combinations, in paintings, in car
modifications (Young 2010).
That contemporary Indigenous painters in the centre of Australia
enjoy using acrylics (synthetic polymer paints) as multi-mixes of bright
colours has been simultaneously the subject of eulogistic writing and a
source of chromophobic anxiety among those who broker the work for
the Western market. The ‘prison of tradition’ is cultural stasis, and using
‘traditional colours’ in art works for the market is an oxymoron. Today,
tourists are still inclined to ask of art works, ‘Are those traditional colours?’
(cf. Michaels 1994). The main anthropological cluster of research into
colour as a general quality has been in Arnhem Land. Following the work
of Berlin and Kay, Jones and Meehan (1978) wrote an important essay
based on research in north-west Arnhem Land whose salience rests on
their long term field relationships.
Jones and Meehan were honest reporters; their case study did not fit the
Berlin and Kay paradigm. The qualities of things were not defined merely
by their hue. Their principle Gidjingali consultants, Frank Gurmanamana
and Nancy Bandeiyama, emphasized to them that there were lively
qualities of things, defined as ‘gungaltja’. Gungaltja are light hues and shiny
substances, especially bright reds. Then there is gungundja, which refers to
dark dull, dark qualities. Jones and Meehan also documented the way that
novel material colours, foodstuffs, toys and clothes were changing the way
people spoke about colours in the early 1970s.
Building on the early twentieth-century research of Australian
anthropologist Donald Thomson, Morphy (1989) wrote in an influential
paper on the transformation of ritual imagery from ‘dull to brilliant’
that Yolngu fostered in order to access Ancestral power. In north-east
Arnhem Land, Morphy related how the effect of the fine lines of cross-
hatching on bodies and bark paintings created this affective becoming. His
Yolngu consultants describe the flash in the eye of the Ancestral shark as
embodying its power. Morphy also pointed to the Yolngu word mintji as
encompassing colour and referring to intentional mark-making anywhere
in the environment: bird and animal markings, on dresses, in the landscape
Introduction 13

and in the art that expresses Yolngu religious relationships with these
(Morphy 1992). Taylor (1996) later wrote about the necessity for visually
complex moving surfaces in bark paintings among west Arnhem Land
artists, something he continues in his contribution to this volume. Deger’s
research on new media among Yolngu builds on these insights regarding
brilliance in her ethnography of film-making with Yolngu, for whom film
screens possess the shimmering qualities so important in their country’s
Ancestral presence.
Ochres are deemed authentically, unproblematically ‘traditional’
because they are substances from the sacred land - country. Australian
structuralist anthropology had to be chromophobic, adhering to the idea
that the substance of ochres, as transformed bodily fluids of Creation
Ancestors, was more important to Aboriginal people than any chromatic
qualities (e.g. Maddock 1972). Others have argued that red ochre is a
medium of transcendence, from sickness to health, death to renewal,
uncleanliness to cleanliness, the secular to sacred, the present reality to
the state of the dreaming (Jones 1984). In their contributions to this book,
Taylor and Biddle each revisit this, writing of the haptic qualities of ochre
in their respective chapters. Both show contemporary Indigenous artists
prefer ochre while plentiful chemical colours are available to them as paints
and dyes.
Warlpiri artists are well known for their multi-coloured acrylic
paintings on canvas. Biddle (this volume) writes about her experiences
with Warlpiri women in the Western Desert of central Australia from
the settlement of Lajamamu who choose to use ochre for image-making,
deliberately eschewing their usual use of standard acrylic paints in work
made for the market. It is through examining practice that Biddle hopes
to get at what ochre does. As transformed Ancestral body parts and
substances, ochres are special kinds of materials that act on the world.
Ochres are more than just ‘colour’. Biddle’s Warlpiri consultants tell her
that ochre is blood-stained earth, land that has been transformed by blood
in Ancestral times; it is part of country, just as people are. Biddle argues
that work made with ochre is inalienable, despite the commoditization of
Australian Western Desert art painted in acrylics.
Taylor’s chapter on innovation in bark painting demonstrates the
indivisibility of line and colour among some Kuninjku artists in western
Arnhem Land. The painters whose work he discusses include the successful
artist John Mawurndjul. The painters refer to the ochres that they use as
14 Introduction

‘colours’ in English. Paintings made for the market are generated using fine
lines drawn with ochres that Kuninjku painters call rarrk. The painter’s ties
to country are evinced in using materials located in that landscape. These
materials are also free, in Western monetary terms at least. Using rarrk in
this new way is an innovation, begun in the 1970s by the locally influential
ritual leader Yirawala and derived from ceremonial body painting. Artists
refer to the vibration of the image, using the same word for images on
television screens, with their colour, movement and energy. The fineness
and regularity of rarrk and the interactive qualities produced where
different pigments cross over one another are considered by the artists as
critical criteria for work to be acknowledged as successful.
Taylor stresses the continuity of practice and materials and the
innovation in image-making that evoke many other colours which might
(though Taylor does not explicitly suggest this) compete with the effects of
multicoloured new paints and perhaps captivate the buyers of their work
with virtuoso ochre-coloured cross-hatching.
New coloured material enables a gamut of new social possibilities.
The transforming miracle of colour appealed to existing Aboriginal
cosmologies with their emphasis on the transformation of the landscape
by the creation Ancestors. Young (this volume) argues that ‘colour’ acted
like a new material and enabled women in particular to change and expand
their previous social status. She discusses the work of one individual,
Amanyi Dora Haggie, to show how the painting practices of today are
a development of ideas that were sparked by initial contact with the
colonizer’s coloured materials. Grief, loss, bodily pain and disablement
are transfigured into multi-coloured displays on canvas. Colour series
(or a palette) of red, yellow and green, for example, have socially shared
meanings as a grouping. These colour series are able to evoke strong
spiritual ties to an entire lived world that is replete with Ancestral meaning
in the weather and the light, in water and sky, in the colours of bush foods
and of sunsets. The use of two or three bright hues placed next to each
other creates a vibration in an image through the colours’ interaction.
Young argues that one colour is thought of as displacing another in a ‘series’
and, following Munn’s essay on excluded spaces and boundaries in the
landscape (Munn 1970), Young argues that these coloured lines are used to
represent the moving boundaries of bodies in space. Colour displacements
create images of constant becoming, something that resonates with
Introduction 15

Saunders’s conclusions about colour talk among her North-West Coast

Canadian consultants.
Eagle (this volume) expands this idea in palettes of the Western Desert
Papunya painters, near neighbours of Pitjantjatjara people. She includes a
telling quote from the British art historian Kenneth Clark, remembering
bark paintings he had seen in 1949. They had ‘delicate colours, perhaps
because they were the only colours available, or perhaps as an expression of
genuine delicacy of feeling; at all events, they were totally unlike the crude
colours of “primitive” art’ (Clark 1974:154). Here is the influence on all of
us of the expert art historian telling us how to respond to art or giving art
its place by assuming that ‘primitive’ colour express ‘primitive’ emotions.
In her contribution, Eagle argues for chromatic connections in the
works of young settler painters discovering the ‘red centre’ of Australia
for themselves in the 1950s, and of what became known from the 1970s
onwards as the new Papunya Tula school of Aboriginal male painters.
Although handling paint in different ways, light, she argues, was the core
effect that they each aimed for. Drysdale’s and Nolan’s ‘red centre’ art used
ochres and browns to represent the outback and a narrative of Aboriginal
peoples’ belonging to it.
Eagle uses examples in particular of paintings by Clifford Possum
Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, in which there is a
latitude for colour effects and a constrained system of graphic symbols
with a long history. The new colours and old symbols were combined
to structure a narrative and give it emotional as well as spatial and
temporal dynamics. The multivalent and novel paints acted as the engine
for Western Desert iconography, emphasizing drama and emotion in
Ancestral religious narratives, generating mobile spatial effects which
evoke the manifold viewpoints of Ancestral stories embedded in the
country. Multiple points of broken colour produce a sense of motion and
of space.
The work of the Australian painter Sidney Nolan, as Eagle describes
it, with its use of house paint to give transparent earth and opaque sky,
especially alluded to Aboriginal presence and ownership. Fellow painter
John Brack noted that Nolan’s way of using paint ‘has the quality of
something glimpsed’ from the corner of the eye. ‘“I want,” wrote Nolan,
… “colour that moves as you watch it”’ (Sayers 1994:23). This seems to me
a profound insight. The glimpse afforded by bright colour caught in the
corner of the eye gives rise to both doubt and to imagining what is not
16 Introduction

seen. The glimpse is akin to the ‘flash’ that some Australian Indigenous
people have spoken about, as mentioned above in relation to Yolngu.
The case of iridescence as a mutable aspect of ‘colour’ that provides
such power is the subject of the contribution to this volume by Sutton and
Snow. They write that the aspiration for Australian Aboriginal people was
power over powerful things. The late Wangkankura man Mick McLean
Irinyili’s recollected his people’s fear of oozing coal tar because of its
refracting hues. Things exhibiting iridescence are alive, unpredictable and
therefore dangerous, seeming to move as you move, animated matter that
evinces spiritual power. Iridescence creates an effect that moves with the
light between visible and invisible, yielding flashing, shifting, fracturing
images. Iridescence is a labile quality, hard to reproduce synthetically. It is
impossible to ask of something iridescent, ‘What colour is that?’

Colours as narrative generators

Case studies of colour can help tell us what colour is. Narrative emerges in
this volume as a powerful defining property of colour. Several of the case
studies in this volume (Eagle, Taylor, Deger, Young) elaborate on colour
as broken, as slivers, as points and lines, and on its importance to the
propulsion of narrative. Deger (this volume) shows how colour can provide
the engine for narrative, affording connections between what otherwise
might seem disparate aspects of the social world (Young 2011). She discusses
how Yolngu, in north-east Arnhem Land, use the flux of multicoloured
things to manifest patterns of experience that can pull Ancestral forces
into the lived world. Deger evokes the poignancy of photographs that
provide the potential, through their colourfulness, to enable the viewer
to recollect a deceased man. Colour relationships generate an ontology.
For an evening’s event of recollection, the constellation of coloured things
and images mingle to give the dead man and his Ancestral ties presence.
The synaesthetic and affective qualities of gravestones, cakes, jelly babies,
party lights, music and photographs provide a socially shared means of
recalling the complex layers of the dead man’s connections and character.
Each participant can understand these connections at their own level of
knowledge – there are a multitude of analogies to apprehend. While there
are certain expectations about what colour things should be, participants
imagine the hue that is right – even against visual evidence to the contrary
– to deliver the desirable social results.
Introduction 17

In her contribution, Greenhalgh is concerned with light and with the

cinematographer’s rematerializing of it to generate the expressive power of
filmic narrative. Film-making though is created as a closed colour world,
less open to the colour analogies condensed in the imagery of the studies
of Australian Aborigines.
Today, a film’s ‘look’ is ready-made, found in a table of palettes that
are drawn from previous films, photos and paintings – the British painter
Turner’s storms at sea, for example. Colour palettes are deliberately
culturally referenced. Although one medium, painting, is additive colour,
the other, film, is subtractive. Greenhalgh argues that colour through a lens
and from a tube are both materialized.
Colours in landscapes, props, costumes and make-up are manipulated
to create a palette in analogue film stocks and, more recently, using
digital media. Both of these media re-mediate the world for us. Within
these technical constraints, as Greenhalgh relates, film stock is a cultural
product, and with this go the dyes and potential colour effects that each
medium provides.
Greenhalgh writes too of her own cinematography: the ‘grey’ of
unbleached cotton, the sooty environment of all British cities before the
Clean Air Act of 1956, and the northern British seaside town of Blackpool,
where the ‘nacreous quality’ of certain skies flicker colours, and where
coloured lights, strung along the seafront during mill-workers’ holidays,
competed with natural colours in the sky and sea. Here is more colour
for and of the Other – this time the British working class recalling and
confirming Munsell’s fears.

Conclusion
Practices that embrace a multitude of colours confuse the clean interpretative
aim of the old symbolic anthropology that, like the Munsell chart, keeps
colours under control and ignores their excesses. If colours push back at us
with their own vitality then we, as living human animals, are part of them
as we become vitalized by brilliant colours. The black-and-white text of a
material book and talk about colour are incomparable to the experience
and practice of handling paint and grinding ochre, walking down a street
crammed with shopfronts or a seafront strung with lights, or to looking at
a sunset or a grey, overcast sky.
Colour as a concept emerges through practice and imagery.
Linguistically, the concept of ‘colour’, it would seem, from the case
18 Introduction

studies discussed here, follows the arrival of material colour. Colour is

transformative and performative too. Sala’s film shows the performative
role of high-wattage colour in Tirana.
The double re-enchantment of Tirana through colour, first in paint
and then on film, that I described above is different from the enchantment
that colour offers colonized peoples. Theirs are worlds that were already
enchanted, where country still reflects back to them a profound belonging.
Colours served to intensify this as colonial contact disrupted former ways
of being-in-the-world. Costall’s crucial argument, following Gibson, that
colours are a quality that compose things rather than vice versa, points to
the way that novel colours can re-socialize the world.
The case studies in this book show how variously materialized colours
can be combined and conceptualized (Young 2006). Distinguishing
colour will make colour a vehicle for a sign system; the red bomb, the red
building, the red painting. Multiple colours thrown together resist any such
classification and will escape these intentions, working to produce and
perform light, space, even time, in concert with our responsive bodies to
bring new meaning into the world. Material colours announce themselves,
things become expressive through their colours.
Colour offers not only the possibility to collapse subjects and objects
but the nature/ culture binary too. The papers in this book show that
colour is not natural. All the Australian case studies in this volume
show how, following their colonial introduction and in different ways,
materialized colours resocialize the world. Although the colour techniques
and coloured materials in these case studies differ, they have in common
that mixtures of many colours together convey a liveliness that materializes
spiritual and religious becoming. The instability of colours adds to this
effect, as, for example, with iridescence. Colours bring things alive and
so imbue them with power. It is in the messiness and jostle of many hues
together that social affinities between concepts, things and people are
generated. This aspect, together with the capacity of colours to transform
and enchant in an increasingly disenchanted world devoid of metaphor, is
perhaps the key to the resurgence of scholarly interest in the topic of colour
as a concept and colours as material substances in the twenty-first century.
Introduction 19

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 1
Does colour matter?
An affordance perspective
Alan Costall

Newton’s mistake, just working with ‘patches of colors’.

 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature

Does colour matter? Sometimes colour can matter a lot. For example,
there was a serious train crash in Sweden in 1876, and the reason, as
the physiologist, Frithiof Holmgren, revealed, was that the engineer on
the train was colour-blind and unable to recognize the colour of a signal
lamp. In devising an effective test for colour-blindness, Holmgren (1877)
followed the example of George Wilson (1855) and selected coloured yarns
as his test items, so that nothing else but colour could matter:

Wilson had shown that objects can be named correctly as to color on

the basis of other than their chromatic attributes: grass is green. Thus
good tests require objects which are different in color and yet alike in
such other respects as shape, texture, touch and smell.
 (Boring 1942:186–7)

Indeed, one of the most tragic consequences of colour blindness can

be when a person fails an industrial colour-blindness test, terminating
previously successful careers in shipping or on the railways (Bailkin 2005).
However, given that colour can matter, it is surely curious that there were
so few references to colour blindness until just over 200 years ago. One
of the first reports was by John Dalton in 1798, who discovered his own
colour blindness in relation to relatively harmless pursuits: the botanical
24 Alan Costall

classification of flowers, and his choice of colour for his clothing (see
Dalton 1948). As Edwin Boring has explained: ‘when Oxford conferred on
him the Doctorate of Civil Laws and its scarlet gown, he, a Quaker, wore
the robe for several days because he liked it, not realizing that it was gay
and conspicuous’ (Boring 1942:196; for Dalton’s own account, see Dalton
1948).
So how does colour blindness impact upon people’s everyday lives?
Two extensive studies of people with colour blindness – anomalous
trichromatism and dichromatism – reveal that there are very real problems,
especially for dichromats, although fortunately not usually life-threatening.1
These include the selection of coloured goods, problems with foodstuffs,
such as the ripeness of fruit and whether meat is properly cooked, and
various problems relating to driving, such as traffic lights (including
distinguishing them from street lighting), warning lights and a vehicle’s red
rear stop lights. To some extent potential problems are alleviated through
avoiding certain careers and adopting various coping strategies, such as
using other ways of checking that meat is cooked (Steward and Cole 1989;
Tagarelli et al. 2004). These extensive questionnaire studies need to be
complemented by diary and observational studies because there may be
some problems that may be quickly forgotten or else not even noticed by
colour-blind people themselves. Interestingly, the reported problems are
not entirely confined to relatively recent innovations such as traffic signals
and warning displays on industrial machinery, although, of course, such
innovations are connected with new activities, such as driving, that can be
particularly perilous, and where the signals are designed in such a way that
colour matters a lot.
In short, then, colour evidently can matter. Having answered the
question posed in my title, this chapter should now end. Unfortunately,
however, there has been a remarkably influential line of thinking within
science that, explicitly or implicitly, would lead us to suppose that colour
is so extremely subjective that , in principle, it should never matter. In this
chapter I will first examine the way that modern cognitive psychology
radically subjectivizes colour and, at the same time, abstracts and
intellectualizes it, all in the hallowed name of serious science. Then I shall
draw upon Gibson’s concept of ‘affordances’ to try to put the colour back
into things, and help explain how colour matters.

1 For an excellent introductory account of colour vision, see Mollon (2003).

Does colour matter? 25

Cognitive illusionism
There is a broad consensus among scientists that colour is not a property
of things, of objects. According to some writers, it is instead a property of
light:

We only know about the color of objects from the light that is reflected
from them. The wave-length of the light is what makes the color.
Long wave-lengths give red, short wave-lengths give blue, with all the
other colors in between. There are special receptors in the eye that are
sensitive to these different wave-lengths of light. So does activity in these
receptors tell us what color [a] tomato is? There is a problem here. The
color isn’t in the tomato. It’s in the light reflected from it.
 (Frith 2007: 34)

However, this is a minority view. Ever since Newton, we have been

taught to believe that ‘the Rays … are not coloured’:

And if at any time I speak of Light and Rays as coloured or endued

with Colours, I would be understood to speak not philosophically and
properly, but grossly, and accordingly to such Conceptions as vulgar
People in seeing all these Experiments would be apt to frame. For the
Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them is nothing else than
a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that
Colour.
 (Newton 1952:124)

Over the years, standard textbooks on colour vision have gone to great
trouble in their introductory chapters to convince us not only that ‘colour
sensations’ are subjective, but also that they bear a highly precarious
relation to the physical nature of light. Physically different mixtures of light
of different wavelengths can look the same (metameric matches), the same
light can look quite different depending upon its surroundings (contrast
effects) and we can even experience colour in the absence of any light (due
to such things as after-effects). Many of the colours we experience, such as
brown or maroon, simply do not occur in the spectrum at all. Then there is
the puzzle of why colour vision is limited to such a narrow and apparently
arbitrary range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Colour, according to this
standard view, is subjective not simply in the sense that it is supposedly
26 Alan Costall

in us rather than in the world, but that it is also hopelessly disconnected

from that world. Everything about colour, according to the standard story,
seems so subjective.
Curiously, however, these same textbooks, having gone to great trouble
to convince us of the essentially subjective status of colour, eventually
forget to speak ‘philosophically and properly’. This is when they turn to the
question of why some species should have evolved colour vision at all. They
come up with a reasonable answer, namely, that colour vision presumably
helps those species relate more effectively to their surroundings. So, at this
point, colour begins to sound as though it could (according to evolutionary
and ecological theory, at least) matter after all.
Unfortunately, in recent years cognitive science has taken a radically
subjectivist turn, backed up by bogus appeals to neuroscience (such
as brain imaging) and ‘evolutionary psychology’. On the one hand, the
hard evidence obtained from physiological studies is supposed to show
conclusively that we are all locked within our own subjectivity. On the
other hand, natural selection is invoked to ‘explain’ how it is that we can all
nevertheless continue to exist relatively safely in a world that forever lies
beyond the realm of our subjective experience.
Let us begin with the appeal to neuroscience. The following example
comes from the contribution of a cognitive psychologist, Richard Gregory,
to a book on postmodernism. (It is suspicious just how easily the scientistic
cognitivists and the anti-scientific postmodernists are able to join arms in
their retreat into subjectivism):

it used to be thought that perceptions, by vision and touch and so on,

can give direct knowledge of objective reality. … But, largely through
the physiological study of the senses over the last two hundred years,
this has become ever more difficult to defend. … [U]ltimately we cannot
know directly what is illusion, any more than truth – for we cannot step
outside perception to compare experience with objective reality.
 (Gregory 1989:94)

So, according to Gregory, at one moment some of us (physiologists, at

least) are supposed to be able sort out exactly how the world works, and
then – on the basis of the objective findings thereby obtained – we are
invited to conclude that none of us could ever know how the world really
works!
Does colour matter? 27

Here is a more recent case of ‘objectively-demonstrated illusionism’. It

is from Christopher Frith, who sets out what he regards as the profound
implications of the findings of the new brain sciences. Once again, according
to Frith, it is precisely because we are now beginning to find out precisely
how our brains ‘work’ that we must come to the inevitable conclusion that
we are all confined within the prison of our own subjectivity:

Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or the mental

world, comes to us through the brain. But our brain’s connection
with the physical world of objects is no more direct than our brain’s
connection with the mental world of ideas. By hiding from us all the
unconscious inferences that it makes, our brain creates the illusion that
we have direct contact with objects in the physical world. And at the
same time our brain creates the illusion that our own mental world
is isolated and private. Through these two illusions we experience
ourselves as agents, acting independently upon the world.
 (Frith 2007:17)

We are clearly meant to take the above passage very seriously. The
original is printed entirely in capitals!
Frith goes on to insist that although we cannot know what the world
is really like, we can nevertheless share our illusions about that world with
other people – even though, according to the logic of his argument, those
other people are themselves, presumably, also part of that unknowable
world existing beyond the prison of our subjectivity:

at the same time, we can share our experiences of the world. Over the
millennia this ability to share experience has created human culture that
has, in its turn, modified the functioning of the human brain.
(ibid.:17)

The evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides invoke the

standard, Cartesian dualism of the physical and mental, and clearly
want to have it both ways, insisting not only that colour is an essentially
subjective property, but also that it can nevertheless help us operate
more effectively in the world of ‘physically colorless objects’ (Tooby and
Cosmides 1995:xi). Unfortunately, in company with many other so-called
evolutionary psychologists, they do not themselves explain how colour
28 Alan Costall

vision could evolve on this basis. Instead, they invoke the theory of natural
selection as a deus ex machina to do all the serious explanatory work for
them – in much the way that Descartes once invoked ‘the goodness of God’
to sort out the strange intractable problems created by his philosophical
assumptions:

[Our common sense] tells us … that color is out there in the world,
an independent property of objects we live among. But scientific
investigations have led us, logical step by logical step, to escape our
fanatically insistent, inelastic intuitions. As a result, we know now that
color is not already out there, an inherent attribute of objects.… Far
from being a physical property of objects, color is a mental property – a
useful invention that specialized circuitry computes in our minds and
then ‘projects onto’ our percepts of physically colorless objects. This
invention allows us to identify and interact with objects and the world
far more richly than we otherwise could. That objects seem to be colored
is an invention of natural selection, which built into some species,
including our own, the specialized neural circuitry responsible.
(ibid.:xi)

So, Tooby and Cosmides would have us believe that although objects
are not really coloured (they only seem to be coloured), colour vision
nevertheless evolved because it ‘allows us to identify and interact with
objects and the world far more richly than we otherwise could’. In Tooby
and Cosmides’s version of evolutionary theory, supposedly ‘natural’
selection is endowed with the supernatural capacity of being able to
operate upon variations that, according to the logic of their own extremely
subjectivist account of colour, could make no possible difference. (If
Darwin were alive today, he would be turning in his grave!)
Modern cognitive psychology presents itself as the antithesis of the
behaviourism that it claims to have undermined when, in fact, they are
two sides of the same coin. Cognitivism’s descent into subjectivism, and
behaviourism’s descent into objectivism, both arise from a commitment to
the same methodological dualism of behaviour and mind. As I have argued
elsewhere, modern cognitive psychology largely retained the methodology
developed in the neo-behaviourism of the 1940s and 1950s, based on a
conception of behaviour as mere ‘colourless movement’ (Costall 2006,
2012; Costall and Leudar 2009).
Does colour matter? 29

Long before the ‘cognitive revolution’, however, a more radical,

alternative approach to psychology had been developing within Gestalt
psychology and experimental phenomenology, and had its roots in
the work of, among others, Goethe, Purkinje and Hering. Instead of
uncritically importing the assumptions of reductionist science into the new
psychology, the emphasis was upon the careful description of everyday
experience as it is lived, and a suspension of the scientistic assumptions of
atomism, mechanism and the disenchantment of the world. Here is David
Katz putting colour back into the world:

Where do we encounter colours? First of all they are certainly to be

observed in objects. A paper is white, a leaf is green, coal is black.…
Then further: The sky is grey, the water has a green shimmer, and
the air is full of beams of light. Such judgments, too, have to do with
colour, and they seem to be perfectly commonplace. The attitude which
dominates such judgments of colour, we shall term the ‘natural’, and,
because of its significance for everyday life, the ‘biological’ attitude. …
Experiences of colour in their natural unbroken meaningfulness arise
out of the need for a practical orientation towards the colour-qualities of
the surrounding world. … It would be a kind of psychological perversion
… to cast these cases aside, and, instead, begin [our] study with colour-
phenomena which the colour specialist has been able to produce only
under the highly artificial conditions of the laboratory. Most people
depart from this world without ever having had a chance to look into
an expensive spectroscope, and without ever having observed an after-
image as anything other than something momentarily wrong with the
eye.
 (Katz 1935:3–4).

The American psychologist James Gibson was well aware of this

European tradition of research, and was very close to some of the leading
figures, many of whom had emigrated to America mainly because of the
rise of fascism. He worked for many years in the same small department
at Smith College with Kurt Koffka, and also maintained close links with
Fritz Heider and Kurt Lewin, who also lived nearby. He also came to know,
and respect, one of the main proponents of experimental phenomenology,
Albert Michotte (Thinès et al. 2014). In fact, Gibson’s approach to
perception could be regarded as a synthesis of European Gestaltism and a
30 Alan Costall

distinctly American ‘functionalist’ approach to psychology, stemming from

William James and John Dewey, and ultimately from Darwin.
Here is Gibson’s own attempt to put the colour back into things:

The man-in-the street has always supposed that the colors of objects
are one thing, whereas the colors of a rainbow or a sunset or an oil-slick
are a different matter. He sees the color of the surface in the surface,
although he may see other colors that appear to be in the light. But this
simple fellow has been told he is wrong ever since Newton’s discovery of
spectral wavelengths, for colors are only in the light, not in the objects.
Even more, he is told by physical optics and physiological optics that
colors are only in him since the light consists of waves … The poor man
is bewildered but he goes on seeing colors in surfaces. More exactly, he
sees very much the same color in the same surface despite change in the
amount, kind, and direction of the illumination falling on it. The light
is variant, the color is invariant, so of course he sees the color in the
surface, not in the light.
 (Gibson 1967:169–70)

Gibson emphatically rejected the standard idea that colour is an

essentially subjective quality. Furthermore, elsewhere in his work, he
also rejected the very idea of isolated, meaningless ‘colour sensations’ as
the fundamental building ‘components’ of our visual experience. Gibson
wrote an important but neglected work (Gibson 1966) that was a sustained
critique of ‘sensation-based’ theories of perception; it also addressed
several other long-standing yet previously unexamined assumptions of
the standard approaches to perception, not least, the idea that perceiving
is – bodily at least – entirely passive, the reception of ‘stimuli’ (see Costall
2017).
What is not so obvious from the preceding quotation, however, is that
Gibson was not claiming that colour is physical. Gibson was attempting to
undermine the very dualism of the physical and mental (along with many
other dualisms, such as knower versus known, body versus mind, and
biology versus culture) (Costall 1995). Given how ingrained these dualisms
have become within the Western tradition, Gibson’s task was not an easy
one, and his attempts to formulate his position were often confusing, even
contradictory. It certainly does not help that Gibson himself, along with
some of his closest followers, would sometimes lose nerve and ‘back off ’
Does colour matter? 31

when the implications of his new concepts seemed to be taking things too
far, notably in the direction of relativism.
However, two of the most important concepts set out by Gibson are
inescapably relational. The first is his own account of proprioception: our
‘awareness of being in the world’ (Gibson 1979:239). Traditionally, sensory
physiologists have distinguished between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ senses,
where certain senses, such as vision and hearing, are supposed to inform
us about the world, whereas other senses, such as receptors in our muscles
and joints, or the vestibular system, inform us about ourselves. Gibson
insisted that all of our senses are about ourselves and the world: about
the world-in-relation-to-ourselves, or (depending upon how we focus our
attention) about ourselves-in-relation-to-the world.
Take the example of vision. As Gibson demonstrated in his classic
studies of ‘optic flow’, transformations and deformations in optic structure
brought about by our own movements in the world are the basis of our
‘awareness of [our own] movement or stasis, of starting and stopping, of
approaching or retreating, of going in one direction or another, and of the
imminence of an encounter’ (ibid.:236). Then there is the ‘visible horizon’,
which corresponds to our eye level and relates distant objects to our own
bodies. For example, objects extending above the visible horizon are higher
than eye level (and, furthermore, the horizon sections equal-sized objects
in equal proportions). Now, as Gibson emphasized, the nature of the
horizon is curious, it ‘is neither subjective nor objective; it expresses the
reciprocity of observer and environment’ (ibid.:164; original emphasis). It
is not ‘in’ us, but nor is it ‘in’ the world. It is not a place we can visit. And
exactly where is the ‘optic flow’ we experience whenever we move? The
world itself is not flowing!
Even more to the point in relation to the matter of colour is Gibson’s
concept of affordances. According to Gibson, it is not only colour that
exists in the world, but meaning too. Things are not colourless, nor are
they meaningless:

affordances are not simply phenomenal qualities of subjective experience

(tertiary qualities, dynamic and physiognomic properties, etc.). … [But
nor are they] simply the physical properties of things as now conceived
by physical science. Instead they are ecological, in the sense that they are
properties of the environment relative to an animal.
 (Gibson 1982:407–8, original emphasis)
32 Alan Costall

For example, whether we could grasp an object, and also how we might
grasp it, depends upon a host of its characteristics: its shape, its fragility,
its slipperiness, its mass and also the distribution of its mass, whether it
is precious or not and so on. And what ‘holds’ all of these characteristics
together and gives them meaning is the animal or person in question,
though not merely as a ‘perceiver’ but, much more fundamentally, as an
agent: ‘[Affordances] have unity relative to the posture and behavior of
the animal being considered. So an affordance cannot be measured as we
measure in physics’ (Gibson 1979:127–8).
The concept of affordances is thus meant to undermine, rather than
merely ‘bridge’, the old psychophysical dualism. Affordances constitute the
material resources for action but they do not fall on one side or the other of
any mental–material divide. They are, as Gibson put it, both physical and
mental because they already implicate the needs and purposes of an agent,
who, in any case, also exists within – rather than beyond – the natural
order of things.
My purpose in referring to Gibson’s concept of affordances is not to
propose that we redefine the ‘ontological’ status of colour by analogy with
that of affordances. The ‘ontology’ of affordances is itself the continuing
topic of lively, if rather futile, debate. For, once we move beyond the
conception of the person as essentially a spectator or observer and
recognize that people (along with other animals) transform and construct
their circumstances, then the traditional divisions between ontology,
epistemology, praxiology and ethics no longer seem so compelling.
My purpose is to try to bring colour in from the cold, as it were, of
physicalism and, for that matter, reductionist biology and into the domain
of affordances, and hence ecology, by regarding colour not as an abstracted,
isolated, sensory quality but as part of the meanings of things. To repeat
the words of David Katz:

The attitude which dominates [everyday] judgments of colour, we shall

term the ‘natural’, and, because of its significance for everyday life, the
‘biological’ attitude. … Experiences of colour in their natural unbroken
meaningfulness arise out of the need for a practical orientation towards
the colour-qualities of the surrounding world.
 (Katz 1935:3–4)
Does colour matter? 33

This emphasis on practical involvement in the world is also the

fundamental point of Gibson’s concept of affordances. As Gibson insisted:

Phenomenal objects are not built up of qualities; it is the other way

around. The affordance of an object is what the infant begins by
noticing. The meaning is observed before the substance and surface, the
color and form, are seen as such.
 (Gibson 1979:134)

In short, engagement in the world is prior to reflective, analytical

awareness. Our primary way of coming to know objects – or, better, to
have them – is in our practical dealings with them. As Dewey has put
it: ‘things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed
and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had
before they are things cognized.’ (Dewey 1958:21). Now, from an affordance
perspective, colour in and of itself could, therefore, have no meaning –
it could not matter. Yet, colour does have meaning in connection with
particular things: the ripeness of an apple, the healthiness or otherwise of
a complexion, the malleability of glowing iron and, to return to the example
with which we began, the colour of a railway signal lamp.
So, colour is ‘in’ things, but in ways that implicate us. In some cases,
the interdependence is obvious, as when we ourselves simply add colour
to things by means of dyes and pigments. In these cases, the colour has
no intrinsic relation to the object itself. But I want now to consider two
examples where this interdependence does not seem quite so arbitrary or,
as in the case of coloured signal lamps, so conventional.
My first example concerns the apparently random way in which human
colour vision is restricted to a highly limited band of electromagnetic
radiation. Why can we not see into the infrared, say, or the ultraviolet?
The reason, it seems, is that the visible spectrum covers the range of
wavelengths where light can reveal the nature of things, through a range of
different kinds of interactions:

It may seem an extraordinary coincidence that such a diversity of

phenomena is encompassed in a band of wavelengths that is not even
a full octave wide; it may seem still more remarkable to be just the
one to which the human eye is sensitive. Actually it may not be a
coincidence at all. So much of interest happens in this narrow region of
34 Alan Costall

the electromagnetic spectrum because these are the wavelengths where

interactions of light with electrons first become important. Waves of
lower energy mainly stimulate the motions of atoms and molecules, and
so they are usually sensed as heat. Radiation of higher energy can ionize
atoms and permanently damage molecules, so that its effects seem
largely destructive. Only in the narrow transition zone between these
extremes is the energy of light well tuned to the electron structure of
matter.
 (Nassau 1980:254)

So it would seem that the visual system is, after all, nicely tuned into
how light itself interacts with things to reveal their structure.
My second example comes from an impressive study by Benedict
Regan and colleagues of how the colour of things can become nicely tuned
to the nature of ourselves (Regan et al. 2001; see also Mollon 1997). Primates
appear to be unique among mammal species in having trichromatic vision
(that is, possessing three rather than two kinds of cone receptors, as most
mammals do). Some primate species play an important, and sometimes
decisive role, in disseminating the seeds of plants by eating their fruits.
Regan and his colleagues monitored the particular fruits eaten by various
trichromatic South American primate species in the rainforest, and they
also measured the reflection spectra of the fruit and also the surrounding
foliage. What they went on to show was that the spectral absorption
characteristics of the cone pigments of the species they were studying
were close to optimal for detecting the fruit they sought among all of the
surrounding leaves. Furthermore, the kinds of fruit largely disseminated
by the species under study were of closely similar colours; additionally,
if they changed colour when they ripened, they did so in a similar way,
despite the fact that the different kinds of fruit came from taxonomically
diverse plants. These primate species are emphatically not (as Tooby and
Cosmides and a host of other cognitivists would have us believe) projecting
mental qualities onto what are essentially colourless and meaningless
objects. As an important ecological resource, these plants have become
what they are in relation to the animals that are helping to reproduce them.

The ‘schema of perception-and-cognition’

Research on colour vision has been based predominantly on the perception
of disembodied lights or else colour patches – in other words, colour as
Does colour matter? 35

an abstraction. This has been the case, of course, in the long-established

research on colour categorization and colour labelling. As in the testing
of colour blindness, the items to be presented have been carefully chosen
to differ in colour but to be entirely ‘alike in such other respects as shape,
texture, touch and smell’. This research has already been the subject of
searching critiques. Here, I want to examine the assumption that colour
per se is fundamental both psychologically and biologically:

Color is one basic building block with which perceptions are constructed
and around which memories are organized.
 (Bornstein 2006:40–1)

the bedrock of color experience is so inescapably what it is that

languages naturally conform to it.
 (D’Andrade 1989:814)

So where does this belief in colour as an experiential bedrock come

from? The obvious answer would be from the findings of the latest
research in the psychology and physiology of perception. However, the
research largely presupposes, rather than investigates, several ‘bedrock’
assumptions that have structured perceptual theory for several centuries.
These assumptions constitute what I have come to call ‘the schema of
perception-and-cognition’, and include the following:
1. Bodily, the perceiver is passive to the world. Stimulation is received not
obtained.
2. Stimulation is converted into an array of spatially and temporally
‘punctate’ sensations, which, in the case of vision, differ solely in their
brightness and colour.
3. These ‘deliverances’ of the senses are, in themselves, incoherent and
meaningless. They constitute nothing more than a blooming, buzzing
confusion.
4. All this sensory confusion is rendered coherent and meaningful through
the intervention of the ‘intellect’, as medieval theorists would have put it,
or, in more modern terms, cognitive organization through, for example,
‘information processing’, ‘hypothesis-testing’ and, most fundamentally,
categorization (I will say more about this in the next section).
5. In principle, information processing could be either ‘top-down’, ‘the
imposition of existing conceptual knowledge upon the ‘input’, or
36 Alan Costall

‘bottom-up’, where the structuring of the chaotic input already occurs

at the ‘periphery’ of the perceptual system. (Note that these two limited
options, identified long ago by Kepler, are only compelling on the
assumption that the perceiver is bodily passive in relation to the world.
The textbooks assimilate Gibson to the schema of traditional theory,
and portray him as a bottom-up theorist. Yet bottom-up and top-down
no longer make much sense once we regard the perceiver as actively
exploring and indeed acting in and upon the world, reaching out, as it
were, into the world. So if we have to fit Gibson into this schema of ‘ups’
and ‘downs’, at all, he is best regarded as a bottom-down theorist!)
6. The outcome of all of this informational processing is that perceivers
construct (or else their brain constructs on their behalf ) an inner, mental
world that ‘re-presents’ the external, physical world.

In much of the current research on perception, this long established

schema is just simply taken for granted. Experimental research does not
test these assumptions, but presupposes them, and experiments fix the
conditions to comply with them. Take, for example, the first assumption
about passivity. In most visual research, the subject is rendered passive,
either deliberately through the use of head clamps or dental bites, or
because the very apparatus itself constrains their movement, as in current
research using brain-scanners. In these studies, as Merleau-Ponty nicely
put it, the subjects ‘lend’ their eyes to the experimenter.
The schema of perception-and-cognition, in its modern form, is based
upon the following long established ‘facts’:

That the information obtained through the eye consists of two things –
sensations, and inferences from those sensations: that the sensations are
merely colours variously arranged, and changes of colour; that all else is
inference, the work of the intellect, not of the eye; or if, in compliance
with common usage, we ascribe it to the eye, we must say that the eye
does it not by an original, but by an acquired power – a power which
the eye exercises, through, and by means of, the reasoning or inferring
faculty.
 (Mill 1842:322)

Admittedly, this schema has several important attractions. It claims to

explain, among other things, illusions and hallucinations, and individual,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
memory of Burns,—every man’s, every boy’s and girl’s head carries
snatches of his songs, and they say them by heart, and, what is
strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to
mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn,
barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them, nay, the music-boxes at
Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand-organs of the
Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them
in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.[213]
 XXIII
REMARKS

AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE THREE

HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF
SHAKSPEARE BY THE SATURDAY CLUB AT THE
REVERE HOUSE, BOSTON, 1864

England’s genius filled all measure

Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to mind its emperor
And life was larger than before;
And centuries brood, nor can attain
The sense and bound of Shakspeare’s brain.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

SHAKSPEARE
’Tis not our fault if we have not made this evening’s circle still
richer than it is. We seriously endeavored, besides our brothers and
our seniors, on whom the ordinary lead of literary and social action
falls—and falls because of their ability—to draw out of their
retirements a few rarer lovers of the muse—“seld-seen flamens”—
whom this day seemed to elect and challenge. And it is to us a
painful disappointment that Bryant and Whittier as guests, and our
own Hawthorne,—with the best will to come,—should have found it
impossible at last; and again, that a well-known and honored
compatriot, who first in Boston wrote elegant verse, and on
Shakspeare, and whose American devotion through forty or fifty
years to the affairs of a bank, has not been able to bury the fires of
his genius,—Mr. Charles Sprague,—pleads the infirmities of age as
an absolute bar to his presence with us.
We regret also the absence of our members Sumner and Motley.
We can hardly think of an occasion where so little need be said.
We are all content to let Shakspeare speak for himself. His fame is
settled on the foundations of the moral and intellectual world.
Wherever there are men, and in the degree in which they are civil—
have power of mind, sensibility to beauty, music, the secrets of
passion, and the liquid expression of thought, he has risen to his
place as the first poet of the world.
Genius is the consoler of our mortal condition, and Shakspeare
taught us that the little world of the heart is vaster, deeper and richer
than the spaces of astronomy. What shocks of surprise and
sympathetic power, this battery, which he is, imparts to every fine
mind that is born! We say to the young child in the cradle, ‘Happy,
and defended against Fate! for here is Nature, and here is
Shakspeare, waiting for you!’
’Tis our metre of culture. He is a cultivated man—who can tell us
something new of Shakspeare. All criticism is only a making of rules
out of his beauties. He is as superior to his countrymen, as to all
other countrymen. He fulfilled the famous prophecy of Socrates, that
the poet most excellent in tragedy would be most excellent in
comedy, and more than fulfilled it by making tragedy also a victorious
melody which healed its own wounds. In short, Shakspeare is the
one resource of our life on which no gloom gathers; the fountain of
joy which honors him who tastes it; day without night; pleasure
without repentance; the genius which, in unpoetic ages, keeps
poetry in honor and, in sterile periods, keeps up the credit of the
human mind.
His genius has reacted on himself. Men were so astonished and
occupied by his poems that they have not been able to see his face
and condition, or say, who was his father and his brethren; or what
life he led; and at the short distance of three hundred years he is
mythical, like Orpheus and Homer, and we have already seen the
most fantastic theories plausibly urged, as that Raleigh and Bacon
were the authors of the plays.
Yet we pause expectant before the genius of Shakspeare—as if
his biography were not yet written; until the problem of the whole
English race is solved.
I see, among the lovers of this catholic genius, here present, a
few, whose deeper knowledge invites me to hazard an article of my
literary creed; that Shakspeare, by his transcendant reach of
thought, so unites the extremes, that, whilst he has kept the theatre
now for three centuries, and, like a street-bible, furnishes sayings to
the market, courts of law, the senate, and common discourse,—he is
yet to all wise men the companion of the closet. The student finds
the solitariest place not solitary enough to read him; and so
searching is his penetration, and such the charm of his speech, that
he still agitates the heart in age as in youth, and will, until it ceases
to beat.
Young men of a contemplative turn carry his sonnets in the pocket.
With that book, the shade of any tree, a room in any inn, becomes a
chapel or oratory in which to sit out their happiest hours. Later they
find riper and manlier lessons in the plays.
And secondly, he is the most robust and potent thinker that ever
was. I find that it was not history, courts and affairs that gave him
lessons, but he that gave grandeur and prestige to them. There
never was a writer who, seeming to draw every hint from outward
history, the life of cities and courts, owed them so little. You shall
never find in this world the barons or kings he depicted. ’Tis fine for
Englishmen to say, they only know history by Shakspeare. The
palaces they compass earth and sea to enter, the magnificence and
personages of royal and imperial abodes, are shabby imitations and
caricatures of his,—clumsy pupils of his instruction. There are no
Warwicks, no Talbots, no Bolingbrokes, no Cardinals, no Harry Fifth,
in real Europe, like his. The loyalty and royalty he drew were all his
own. The real Elizabeths, Jameses and Louises were painted sticks
before this magician.
The unaffected joy of the comedy,—he lives in a gale,—contrasted
with the grandeur of the tragedy, where he stoops to no contrivance,
no pulpiting, but flies an eagle at the heart of the problem; where his
speech is a Delphi,—the great Nemesis that he is and utters. What a
great heart of equity is he! How good and sound and inviolable his
innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the
pure sense of humanity on each occasion. He dwarfs all writers
without a solitary exception. No egotism. The egotism of men is
immense. It concealed Shakspeare for a century. His mind has a
superiority such that the universities should read lectures on him,
and conquer the unconquerable if they can.
There are periods fruitful of great men; others, barren; or, as the
world is always equal to itself, periods when the heat is latent,—
others when it is given out.
They are like the great wine years,—the vintage of 1847, is it? or
1835?—which are not only noted in the carte of the table d’hôte, but
which, it is said, are always followed by new vivacity in the politics of
Europe. His birth marked a great wine year when wonderful grapes
ripened in the vintage of God, when Shakspeare and Galileo were
born within a few months of each other, and Cervantes was his exact
contemporary, and, in short space before and after, Montaigne,
Bacon, Spenser, Raleigh and Jonson. Yet Shakspeare, not by any
inferiority of theirs, but simply by his colossal proportions, dwarfs the
geniuses of Elizabeth as easily as the wits of Anne, or the poor
slipshod troubadours of King René.
In our ordinary experience of men there are some men so born to
live well that, in whatever company they fall,—high or low,—they fit
well, and lead it! but, being advanced to a higher class, they are just
as much in their element as before, and easily command: and being
again preferred to selecter companions, find no obstacle to ruling
these as they did their earlier mates; I suppose because they have
more humanity than talent, whilst they have quite as much of the last
as any of the company. It would strike you as comic, if I should give
my own customary examples of this elasticity, though striking
enough to me. I could name in this very company—or not going far
out of it—very good types, but in order to be parliamentary, Franklin,
Burns and Walter Scott are examples of the rule; and king of men, by
this grace of God also, is Shakspeare.
The Pilgrims came to Plymouth in 1620. The plays of Shakspeare
were not published until three years later. Had they been published
earlier, our forefathers, or the most poetical among them, might have
stayed at home to read them.
 XXIV
HUMBOLDT

AN ABSTRACT OF MR. EMERSON’S REMARKS

MADE AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE
CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, SEPTEMBER 14,
1869

“If a life prolonged to an advanced period bring with it

several inconveniences to the individual, there is a
compensation in the delight of being able to compare older
states of knowledge with that which now exists, and to see
great advances in knowledge develop themselves under our
eyes in departments which had long slept in inactivity.”
Humboldt, Letter to Ritter.

HUMBOLDT
Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle,
like Julius Cæsar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time
to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force
and the range of the faculties,—a universal man, not only possessed
of great particular talents, but they were symmetrical, his parts were
well put together. As we know, a man’s natural powers are often a
sort of committee that slowly, one at a time, give their attention and
action; but Humboldt’s were all united, one electric chain, so that a
university, a whole French Academy, travelled in his shoes. With
great propriety, he named his sketch of the results of science
Cosmos. There is no other such survey or surveyor. The wonderful
Humboldt, with his solid centre and expanded wings, marches like
an army, gathering all things as he goes. How he reaches from
science to science, from law to law, folding away moons and
asteroids and solar systems in the clauses and parentheses of his
encyclopædic paragraphs! There is no book like it; none indicating
such a battalion of powers. You could not put him on any sea or
shore but his instant recollection of every other sea or shore
illuminated this.
He was properly a man of the world; you could not lose him; you
could not detain him; you could not disappoint him, for at any point
on land or sea he found the objects of his researches. When he was
stopped in Spain and could not get away, he turned round and
interpreted their mountain system, explaining the past history of the
continent of Europe. He belonged to that wonderful German nation,
the foremost scholars in all history, who surpass all others in
industry, space and endurance. A German reads a literature whilst
we are reading a book. One of their writers warns his countrymen
that it is not the Battle of Leipsic, but the Leipsic Fair Catalogue,
which raises them above the French. I remember Cuvier tells us of
fossil elephants; that Germany has furnished the greatest number;—
not because there are more elephants in Germany,—oh no; but
because in that empire there is no canton without some well-
informed person capable of making researches and publishing
interesting results. I know that we have been accustomed to think
they were too good scholars, that because they reflect, they never
resolve, that “in a crisis no plan-maker was to be found in the
empire;” but we have lived to see now, for the second time in the
history of Prussia, a statesman of the first class, with a clear head
and an inflexible will.
 XXV
WALTER SCOTT

REMARKS AT THE CELEBRATION BY THE

MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF
THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH,
AUGUST 15, 1871
Scott, the delight of generous boys.

As far as Sir Walter Scott aspired to be known for a fine

gentleman, so far our sympathies leave him.... Our concern is
only with the residue, where the man Scott was warmed with
a divine ray that clad with beauty every sheet of water, every
bald hill in the country he looked upon, and so reanimated the
well-nigh obsolete feudal history and illustrated every hidden
corner of a barren and disagreeable territory.
Lecture, “Being and Seeing,” 1838.

WALTER SCOTT
The memory of Sir Walter Scott is dear to this Society, of which he
was for ten years an honorary member. If only as an eminent
antiquary who has shed light on the history of Europe and of the
English race, he had high claims to our regard. But to the rare tribute
of a centennial anniversary of his birthday, which we gladly join with
Scotland, and indeed with Europe, to keep, he is not less entitled—
perhaps he alone among literary men of this century is entitled—by
the exceptional debt which all English-speaking men have gladly
owed to his character and genius. I think no modern writer has
inspired his readers with such affection to his own personality. I can
well remember as far back as when The Lord of the Isles was first
republished in Boston, in 1815,—my own and my school-fellows’ joy
in the book.[214] Marmion and The Lay had gone before, but we
were then learning to spell. In the face of the later novels, we still
claim that his poetry is the delight of boys. But this means that when
we reopen these old books we all consent to be boys again. We
tread over our youthful grounds with joy. Critics have found them to
be only rhymed prose. But I believe that many of those who read
them in youth, when, later, they come to dismiss finally their school-
days’ library, will make some fond exception for Scott as for Byron.
It is easy to see the origin of his poems. His own ear had been
charmed by old ballads crooned by Scottish dames at firesides, and
written down from their lips by antiquaries; and finding them now
outgrown and dishonored by the new culture, he attempted to dignify
and adapt them to the times in which he lived. Just so much thought,
so much picturesque detail in dialogue or description as the old
ballad required, so much suppression of details and leaping to the
event, he would keep and use, but without any ambition to write a
high poem after a classic model. He made no pretension to the lofty
style of Spenser, or Milton, or Wordsworth. Compared with their
purified songs, purified of all ephemeral color or material, his were
vers de société. But he had the skill proper to vers de société,—skill
to fit his verse to his topic, and not to write solemn pentameters alike
on a hero or a spaniel. His good sense probably elected the ballad to
make his audience larger. He apprehended in advance the immense
enlargement of the reading public, which almost dates from the era
of his books,—which his books and Byron’s inaugurated; and which,
though until then unheard of, has become familiar to the present
time.
If the success of his poems, however large, was partial, that of his
novels was complete. The tone of strength in Waverley at once
announced the master, and was more than justified by the superior
genius of the following romances, up to the Bride of Lammermoor,
which almost goes back to Æschylus for a counterpart as a painting
of Fate,—leaving on every reader the impression of the highest and
purest tragedy.[215]
His power on the public mind rests on the singular union of two
influences. By nature, by his reading and taste an aristocrat, in a
time and country which easily gave him that bias, he had the virtues
and graces of that class, and by his eminent humanity and his love
of labor escaped its harm. He saw in the English Church the symbol
and seal of all social order; in the historical aristocracy the benefits to
the state which Burke claimed for it; and in his own reading and
research such store of legend and renown as won his imagination to
their cause. Not less his eminent humanity delighted in the sense
and virtue and wit of the common people. In his own household and
neighbors he found characters and pets of humble class, with whom
he established the best relation,—small farmers and tradesmen,
shepherds, fishermen, gypsies, peasant-girls, crones,—and came
with these into real ties of mutual help and good will. From these
originals he drew so genially his Jeanie Deans, his Dinmonts and
Edie Ochiltrees, Caleb Balderstones and Fairservices, Cuddie
Headriggs, Dominies, Meg Merrilies, and Jenny Rintherouts, full of
life and reality; making these, too, the pivots on which the plots of his
stories turn; and meantime without one word of brag of this
discernment,—nay, this extreme sympathy reaching down to every
beggar and beggar’s dog, and horse and cow. In the number and
variety of his characters he approaches Shakspeare. Other painters
in verse or prose have thrown into literature a few type-figures; as
Cervantes, De Foe, Richardson, Goldsmith, Sterne and Fielding; but
Scott portrayed with equal strength and success every figure in his
crowded company.
His strong good sense saved him from the faults and foibles
incident to poets,—from nervous egotism, sham modesty or
jealousy. He played ever a manly part.[216] With such a fortune and
such a genius, we should look to see what heavy toll the Fates took
of him, as of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Swift or Byron. But no: he had
no insanity, or vice, or blemish. He was a thoroughly upright, wise
and great-hearted man, equal to whatever event or fortune should try
him. Disasters only drove him to immense exertion. What an
ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and
writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.
Under what rare conjunction of stars was this man born, that,
wherever he lived, he found superior men, passed all his life in the
best company, and still found himself the best of the best! He was
apprenticed at Edinburgh to a Writer to the Signet, and became a
Writer to the Signet, and found himself in his youth and manhood
and age in the society of Mackintosh, Horner, Jeffrey, Playfair,
Dugald Stewart, Sydney Smith, Leslie, Sir William Hamilton, Wilson,
Hogg, De Quincey,—to name only some of his literary neighbors,
and, as soon as he died, all this brilliant circle was broken up.
 XXVI
SPEECH

AT BANQUET IN HONOR OF THE CHINESE

EMBASSY BOSTON, 1860

Nature creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to

escape from limitation into the vast and boundless, to use a
freedom of fancy which plays with all works of Nature, great
or minute, galaxy or grain of dust, as toys and words of the
mind; inculcates a beatitude to be found in escape from all
organization and all personality, and makes ecstasy an
institution.

SPEECH
AT THE BANQUET IN HONOR OF THE CHINESE EMBASSY

Mr. Mayor: I suppose we are all of one opinion on this

remarkable occasion of meeting the embassy sent from the oldest
Empire in the world to the youngest Republic. All share the surprise
and pleasure when the venerable Oriental dynasty—hitherto a
romantic legend to most of us—suddenly steps into the fellowship of
nations. This auspicious event, considered in connection with the
late innovations in Japan, marks a new era, and is an irresistible
result of the science which has given us the power of steam and the
electric telegraph. It is the more welcome for the surprise. We had
said of China, as the old prophet said of Egypt, “Her strength is to sit
still.” Her people had such elemental conservatism that by some
wonderful force of race and national manners, the wars and
revolutions that occur in her annals have proved but momentary
swells or surges on the pacific ocean of her history, leaving no trace.
But in its immovability this race has claims. China is old, not in time
only, but in wisdom, which is gray hair to a nation,—or, rather, truly
seen, is eternal youth. As we know, China had the magnet centuries
before Europe; and block-printing or stereotype, and lithography, and
gunpowder, and vaccination, and canals; had anticipated Linnæus’s
nomenclature of plants; had codes, journals, clubs, hackney
coaches, and, thirty centuries before New York, had the custom of
New Year’s calls of comity and reconciliation. I need not mention its
useful arts,—its pottery indispensable to the world, the luxury of
silks, and its tea, the cordial of nations. But I must remember that
she has respectable remains of astronomic science, and historic
records of forgotten time, that have supplied important gaps in the
ancient history of the western nations. Then she has philosophers
who cannot be spared. Confucius has not yet gathered all his fame.
When Socrates heard that the oracle declared that he was the wisest
of men, he said, it must mean that other men held that they were
wise, but that he knew that he knew nothing. Confucius had already
affirmed this of himself: and what we call the Golden Rule of
Jesus, Confucius had uttered in the same terms five hundred years
before. His morals, though addressed to a state of society unlike
ours, we read with profit to-day. His rare perception appears in his
Golden Mean, his doctrine of Reciprocity, his unerring insight,—
putting always the blame of our misfortunes on ourselves; as when
to the governor who complained of thieves, he said, “If you, sir, were
not covetous, though you should reward them for it, they would not
steal.” His ideal of greatness predicts Marcus Antoninus. At the same
time, he abstained from paradox, and met the ingrained prudence of
his nation by saying always, “Bend one cubit to straighten eight.”
China interests us at this moment in a point of politics. I am sure
that gentlemen around me bear in mind the bill which the Hon. Mr.
Jenckes of Rhode Island has twice attempted to carry through
Congress, requiring that candidates for public offices shall first pass
examinations on their literary qualifications for the same. Well, China
has preceded us, as well as England and France, in this essential
correction of a reckless usage; and the like high esteem of education
appears in China in social life, to whose distinctions it is made an
indispensable passport.
It is gratifying to know that the advantages of the new intercourse
between the two countries are daily manifest on the Pacific coast.
The immigrants from Asia come in crowds. Their power of
continuous labor, their versatility in adapting themselves to new
conditions, their stoical economy, are unlooked-for virtues. They
send back to their friends, in China, money, new products of art, new
tools, machinery, new foods, etc., and are thus establishing a
commerce without limit. I cannot help adding, after what I have heard
to-night, that I have read in the journals a statement from an English
source, that Sir Frederic Bruce attributed to Mr. Burlingame the merit
of the happy reform in the relations of foreign governments to China.
I am quite sure that I heard from Mr. Burlingame in New York, in his
last visit to America, that the whole merit of it belonged to Sir
Frederic Bruce. It appears that the ambassadors were emulous in
their magnanimity. It is certainly the best guaranty for the interests of
China and of humanity.
 XXVII
REMARKS

AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE

RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, BOSTON MAY 30,
1867

In many forms we try

To utter God’s infinity,
But the Boundless hath no form,
And the Universal Friend
Doth as far transcend
An angel as a worm.

The great Idea baffles wit,

Language falters under it,
It leaves the learned in the lurch;
Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find
The measure of the eternal Mind,
Nor hymn nor prayer nor church.

REMARKS
AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

Mr. Chairman: I hardly felt, in finding this house this morning, that
I had come into the right hall. I came, as I supposed myself
summoned, to a little committee meeting, for some practical end,
where I should happily and humbly learn my lesson; and I supposed
myself no longer subject to your call when I saw this house. I have
listened with great pleasure to the lessons which we have heard. To
many, to those last spoken, I have found so much in accord with my
own thought that I have little left to say. I think that it does great
honor to the sensibility of the committee that they have felt the
universal demand in the community for just the movement they have
begun. I say again, in the phrase used by my friend, that we began
many years ago,—yes, and many ages before that. But I think the
necessity very great, and it has prompted an equal magnanimity, that
thus invites all classes, all religious men, whatever their connections,
whatever their specialties, in whatever relation they stand to the
Christian Church, to unite in a movement of benefit to men, under
the sanction of religion. We are all very sensible—it is forced on us
every day—of the feeling that churches are outgrown; that the
creeds are outgrown; that a technical theology no longer suits us. It
is not the ill will of people—no, indeed, but the incapacity for
confining themselves there. The church is not large enough for the
man; it cannot inspire the enthusiasm which is the parent of
everything good in history, which makes the romance of history. For
that enthusiasm you must have something greater than yourselves,
and not less.
The child, the young student, finds scope in his mathematics and
chemistry or natural history, because he finds a truth larger than he
is; finds himself continually instructed. But, in churches, every
healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in something less; it is
checked, cribbed, confined. And the statistics of the American, the
English and the German cities, showing that the mass of the
population is leaving off going to church, indicate the necessity,
which should have been foreseen, that the Church should always be
new and extemporized, because it is eternal and springs from the
sentiment of men, or it does not exist.[217] One wonders sometimes
that the churches still retain so many votaries, when he reads the
histories of the Church. There is an element of childish infatuation in
them which does not exalt our respect for man. Read in Michelet,
that in Europe, for twelve or fourteen centuries, God the Father had
no temple and no altar. The Holy Ghost and the Son of Mary were
worshipped, and in the thirteenth century the First Person began to
appear at the side of his Son, in pictures and in sculpture, for
worship, but only through favor of his Son. These mortifying
puerilities abound in religious history. But as soon as every man is
apprised of the Divine Presence within his own mind,—is apprised
that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of
vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of
duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of
culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral
sentiment, then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the
social and all the private action.
What strikes me in the sudden movement which brings together
to-day so many separated friends,—separated but sympathetic,—
and what I expected to find here, was some practical suggestions by
which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true
Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure
benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active
duty, that worship finds expression. What is best in the ancient
religions was the sacred friendships between heroes, the Sacred
Bands, and the relations of the Pythagorean disciples. Our Masonic
institutions probably grew from the like origin. The close association
which bound the first disciples of Jesus is another example; and it
were easy to find more. The soul of our late war, which will always
be remembered as dignifying it, was, first, the desire to abolish
slavery in this country, and secondly, to abolish the mischief of the
war itself, by healing and saving the sick and wounded soldiers,—
and this by the sacred bands of the Sanitary Commission. I wish that
the various beneficent institutions which are springing up, like joyful
plants of wholesomeness, all over this country, should all be
remembered as within the sphere of this committee,—almost all of
them are represented here,—and that within this little band that has
gathered here to-day, should grow friendship. The interests that grow
out of a meeting like this should bind us with new strength to the old
eternal duties.
 XXVIII
SPEECH

AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE

FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT
TEMPLE FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869

Thou metest him by centuries,

And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek’st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou ask’st in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.

SPEECH
AT SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

Friends: I wish I could deserve anything of the kind expression of

my friend, the President, and the kind good will which the audience
signifies, but it is not in my power to-day to meet the natural
demands of the occasion, and, quite against my design and my will, I
shall have to request the attention of the audience to a few written
remarks, instead of the more extensive statement which I had hoped
to offer them.
I think we have disputed long enough. I think we might now
relinquish our theological controversies to communities more idle
and ignorant than we. I am glad that a more realistic church is
coming to be the tendency of society, and that we are likely one day
to forget our obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel each other in
good works. I have no wish to proselyte any reluctant mind, nor, I
think, have I any curiosity or impulse to intrude on those whose ways
of thinking differ from mine. But as my friend, your presiding officer,
has asked me to take at least some small part in this day’s
conversation, I am ready to give, as often before, the first simple
foundation of my belief, that the Author of Nature has not left himself
without a witness in any sane mind: that the moral sentiment speaks
to every man the law after which the Universe was made; that we
find parity, identity of design, through Nature, and benefit to be the
uniform aim: that there is a force always at work to make the best
better and the worst good.[218] We have had not long since
presented us by Max Müller a valuable paragraph from St.
Augustine, not at all extraordinary in itself, but only as coming from
that eminent Father in the Church, and at that age, in which St.
Augustine writes: “That which is now called the Christian religion
existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting
of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the
true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.” I
believe that not only Christianity is as old as the Creation,—not only
every sentiment and precept of Christianity can be paralleled in other
religious writings,—but more, that a man of religious susceptibility,
and one at the same time conversant with many men,—say a much-
travelled man,—can find the same idea in numberless
conversations. The religious find religion wherever they associate.
When I find in people narrow religion, I find also in them narrow
reading. Nothing really is so self-publishing, so divulgatory, as
thought. It cannot be confined or hid. It is easily carried; it takes no
room; the knowledge of Europe looks out into Persia and India, and
to the very Kaffirs. Every proverb, every fine text, every pregnant
jest, travels across the line; and you will find it at Cape Town, or
among the Tartars. We are all believers in natural religion; we all
agree that the health and integrity of man is self-respect, self-
subsistency, a regard to natural conscience. All education is to
accustom him to trust himself, discriminate between his higher and
lower thoughts, exert the timid faculties until they are robust, and