But how aroused it?--I later asked myself. Common theories about the ugly sensation of bright red could not explain for me the weirdness of that experience. As for the sanguine associations of the color, they could interpret little in my case; for the sight of blood had never affected my nerves in the least. I thought that the theory of psychical inheritance might furnish some explanation;--but how could it meet the fact that a color, which the adult finds insufferable, continues to delight the child?
All ruddy tones, however, are not unpleasant to refined sensibility: some are quite the reverse,--as, for example, the various tender colors called pink or rose. These appeal to very agreeable kinds of sensuous experience: they suggest delicacy and softness; they awaken qualities of feeling totally different from those excited by vermilion or scarlet. Pink, being the tint of the blossoming of flowers and the blossoming of youth,--of the ripeness of fruit and the ripeness of flesh, is ever associated with impressions of fragrance and sweetness, and with memories of beautiful lips and cheeks.
No: it is only the pure brilliant red, the fervid red, that arouses sinister feeling. Experience with this color seems to have been the same even in societies evolved under conditions utterly unlike those of our own history,--Japan being a significant example. The more refined and humane a civilization becomes, the less are displays of the color tolerated in its cultivated circles. But how are we to account for that pleasure which bright red still gives to the children of the people who detest it?
Many sensations which delighted us as children, prove to us either insipid or offensive in adult life. Why? Because there have grown up with our growth feelings which, though now related to them, were dormant during childhood; ideas now associated with them, but undeveloped during childhood; and experiences connected with them, never imagined in childhood.
For the mind, at our birth, is even less developed than the body; and its full ripening demands very much more time than is needed for the perfect bodily growth. Both by his faults and by his virtues the child resembles the savage, because the instincts and the emotions of the primitive man are the first to mature within him;--and they are the first to mature in the individual because they were the first evolved in the history of the race, being the most necessary to self-maintenance. That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the nobler mental and moral qualities--comparatively recent products of social discipline and civilized habit--have at last gained massiveness enough to dominate them under normal conditions;--have become like powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to depend for guidance.