On account of our undeveloped sensitivity, the emotional reactions to color are found to be largely personal and whimsical:  one person “loves” pink, another purple, or green.  Color therapeutics is too new a thing to be relied upon for data, for even though colors are susceptible of classification as sedative, recuperative and stimulating, no two classifications arrived at independently would be likely to correspond.  Most people appear to prefer bright, pure colors when presented to them in small areas, red and blue being the favourites.  Certain data have been accumulated regarding the physiological effect and psychological value of different colors, but this order of research is in its infancy, and we shall have recourse, therefore, to theory, in the absence of any safer guide.

One of the theories which may be said to have justified itself in practice in a different field is that upon which is based Delsarte’s famous art of expression.  It has schooled some of the finest actors in the world, and raised others from mediocrity to distinction.  The Delsarte system is founded upon the idea that man is a triplicity of physical, emotional, and intellectual qualities or attributes, and that the entire body and every part thereof conforms to, and expresses this triplicity.  The generative and digestive region corresponds with the physical nature, the breast with the emotional, and the head with the intellectual; “below” represents the nadir of ignorance and dejection, “above” the zenith of wisdom and spiritual power.  This seems a natural, and not an arbitrary classification, having interesting confirmations and correspondencies, both in the outer world of form, and in the inner world of consciousness.  Moreover, it is in accord with that theosophic scheme derived from the ancient and august wisdom of the East, which longer and better than any other has withstood the obliterating action of slow time, and is even now renascent.  Let us therefore attempt to classify the colors of the spectrum according to this theory, and discover if we can how nearly such a classification is conformable to reason and experience.

The red end of the spectrum, being lowest in vibratory rate, would correspond to the physical nature, proverbially more sluggish than the emotional and mental.  The phrase “like a red rag to a bull,” suggests a relation between the color red and the animal consciousness established by observation.  The “low-brow” is the dear lover of the red necktie; the “high-brow” is he who sees violet shadows on the snow.  We “see red” when we are dominated by ignoble passion.  Though the color green is associated with the idea of jealousy, it is associated also with the idea of sympathy, and jealousy in the last analysis is the fear of the loss of sympathy; it belongs, at all events to the mediant, or emotional group of colors; while blue and violet are proverbially intellectual and spiritual colors, and their place in the spectrum