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Page 38
Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and offers a
convenient name for a process to which every teacher must frequently
refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing
into the mind. It corresponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in
psychology, being only one of the innumerable results of the
psychological process of association of ideas; and psychology itself can
easily dispense with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics.
The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from
without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an
effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness
than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making
connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing
what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into
are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the
present sort of impression with them. If, for instance, you hear me call
out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by
inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its
old associates: they go out to meet it; it is received by them,
recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the
fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with
memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as
we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us
completely nondescript: it always _reminds_ of something similar in
quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and
which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind
supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. We
_conceive_ the impression in some definite way. We dispose of it
according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way
of 'ideas.' This way of taking in the object is the process of
apperception. The conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by
Herbart the 'apperceiving mass.' The apperceived impression is engulfed
in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one
part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and
another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous
contents of the mind.
I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of apperception
is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the association of
ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which
it is often impossible to distinguish the share of the two factors. For
example, when we listen to a person speaking or read a page of print,
much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. We
overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong
ones; and how little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we
realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is
not so much that we cannot understand what the actors say as that we
cannot hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under
similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English
verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
upon a much slighter auditory hint.
In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law
makes itself felt,--the law of economy. In admitting a new body of
experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our
pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in
some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate
anything _absolutely_ new, anything without any name, and for which a
new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be
inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first
time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain;
an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato;
an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar
Hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the Polynesians called
Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr. Rooper has written a little book on
apperception, to which he gives the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers,"
that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never
seen ferns before.
In later life this economical tendency to leave the old undisturbed
leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which would
entail extensive rearrangement of the previous system of beliefs is
always ignored or extruded from the mind in case it cannot be
sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously with the system.
We have all conducted discussions with middle-aged people, overpowered
them with our reasons, forced them to admit our contention, and a week
later found them back as secure and constant in their old opinion as if
they had never conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but
there are young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than
we think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that in the
majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.
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