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Page 35
I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so
as to form new or improved conceptions.
XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be,
visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or
concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word.
That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or
context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_.
They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its
type or class. In this undated condition, we call them products of
'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used
where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing.
Conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our
present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit
myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word
'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these
be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Julius C�sar,' or classes of
things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract
attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.'
The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as
experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I
used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting
slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many
ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him
associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child
eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are
little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired
ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind,
are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when
we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four
quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two
conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be
described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of
them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of
life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired
them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the
vicissitudes of experience.
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive
order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain
kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later
age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most
interested in the sensible properties of material things.
_Constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant
hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of
things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the
muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical
conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world
through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the
sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various
kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up
with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the
printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the
material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness
which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel
himself perfectly at home.
I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart
from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for
emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance
with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have
haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and
cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with
such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After
adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of
these primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
habits are hard to acquire.
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