'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of
the present day. Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain
text-book, which I take from an educational journal:--
#WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?#
For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCHOLOGY,
Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just published.
The difference between Perception and Apperception is
explained for the teacher in the preface to Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY.
Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of
Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for
them is Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first
expounded.
The most important idea in educational psychology is
Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution
in educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just
published.
Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
receipt of $1.00.
Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned;
and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I had in view when
I said at our first meeting that the teachers were suffering at the
present day from a certain industrious mystification on the part of
editors and publishers. Perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in
their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this
mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher
is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered.
And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so
trivial and commonplace a matter,--meaning nothing more than the manner
in which we receive a thing into our minds,--that she fears she must
have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and
goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of
stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate
to her mission.
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.
In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception codified,
and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way
so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book which I remember reading
there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from
each other. There was associative apperception, subsumptive
apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. It is
needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass
artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates
itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are
advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing life of the
mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the
recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long
Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence.
There is no reason, if we are classing the different types of
apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred.
There are as many types of apperception as there are possible ways in
which an incoming experience may be reacted on by an individual mind. A
little while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest of a lady who, a fortnight
before, had taken her seven-year-old boy for the first time to Niagara
Falls. The child silently glared at the phenomenon until his mother,
supposing him struck speechless by its sublimity, said, "Well, my boy,
what do you think of it?" to which, "Is that the kind of spray I spray
my nose with?" was the boy's only reply. That was his mode of
apperceiving the spectacle. You may claim this as a particular type, and
call it by the Greek name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you
like; and, if you do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than
are some of the authors of the books.
M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example of the
different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which are
possible at different stages of individual experience. A dwelling-house
took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing the conflagration
from the arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed nothing but the
liveliest delight at its brilliancy. But, when the bell of the fire
engine was heard approaching, the child was thrown by the sound into a
paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as you know, very alarming to
young children. In what opposite ways must the child's parents have
apperceived the burning house and the engine respectively!
The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be in, or
to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression quite
differently on different occasions. A medical or engineering expert
retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts in the same
way as if the other side had retained him. When people are at
loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually shows that
they have too few heads of classification to apperceive by; for, as a
general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough to show that neither
one of their rival interpretations is a perfect fit. Both sides deal
with the matter by approximation, squeezing it under the handiest or
least disturbing conception: whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be
better to enlarge their stock of ideas or invent some altogether new
title for the phenomenon.
Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to whether
certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables, until
Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, which ended
the disputes. In law courts no _tertium quid_ is recognized between
insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished: if insane, acquitted;
and it is seldom hard to find two experts who will take opposite views
of his case. All the while, nature is more subtle than our doctors. Just
as a room is neither dark nor light absolutely, but might be dark for a
watchmaker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or play in, so a man
may be sane for some purposes and insane for others,--sane enough to be
left at large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial
affairs. The word 'crank,' which became familiar at the time of
Guiteau's trial, fulfilled the need of a _tertium quid_. The foreign
terms 'déséquilibré,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 'psychopathic'
subject, have arisen in response to the same need.
The whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of newly
forged technical names whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects
of phenomena,--phenomena which could only be squeezed with violence into
the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of conceptions. As time goes on,
our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and more voluminous, having to
keep up with the ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiving
ideas.
In this gradual process of interaction between the new and the old, not
only is the new modified and determined by the particular sort of old
which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the old itself, is
modified by the particular kind of new which it assimilates. Thus, to
take the stock German example of the child brought up in a house where
there are no tables but square ones, 'table' means for him a thing in
which square corners are essential. But, if he goes to a house where
there are round tables and still calls them tables, his apperceiving
notion 'table' acquires immediately a wider inward content. In this way,
our conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed
essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. The
extension of the notion 'beast' to porpoises and whales, of the notion
'organism' to society, are familiar examples of what I mean.
But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them
large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an educated man
is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts
the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to
name and classify the actual emergency. The more adequate the stock of
ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his
behavior likely to be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we
shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the
finding of the right _names_ under which to class the proposed
alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
incompetent deliberator. The names--and each name stands for a
conception or idea--are our instruments for handling our problems and
solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we are too apt to
forget an important fact, which is that in most human beings the stock
of names and concepts is mostly acquired during the years of adolescence
and the earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked you a moment
ago by saying that most men begin to be old fogies at the age of
twenty-five. It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into
middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with
individual cases connected with his profession or business life. In
this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his
knowledge grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between
things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a
comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint themselves with
the principles of a new science after even twenty-five. If you do not
study political economy in college, it is a thousand to one that its
main conceptions will remain unknown to you through life. Similarly with
biology, similarly with electricity. What percentage of persons now
fifty years old have any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or
how the trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one
per cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these conceptions.
There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which
makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and
makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all
sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out
hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives. Such good
intentions are hardly ever carried out. The conceptions acquired before
thirty remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such exceptional cases
of perpetually self-renovating youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by
the admiration they awaken, the universality of the rule. And it may
well solemnize a teacher, and confirm in him a healthy sense of the
importance of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his
present ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's
future life is probably bound to be.