much if we are surrounded by bad colour or not, or whether we do or do not neglect to train and develop our feeling for colour.
To these questions the following points may be submitted in proof of its importance:
Firstly: Neglect tends to degrade and destroy the great colour sense with which we have been endowed, just as disuse of any member of the body usually brings about its atrophy or disease.
Secondly: Because much in civilization besides art is dependent upon a widespread and refined colour sense, without which many channels of observation are closed. For example, delicate questions of colour enter into biological, chemical, and spectroscopic research.
Thirdly: Our intellectual and even our literary capacity is injured if we do not possess a keen sense of colour. Without it our great poets could never have written many of the best passages in some of their most imaginative poems, for to give only one instance—the delicate colour harmonies of sea or sky would
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