CHAPTER XX

APPERCEPTION IN RELATION TO EDUCATION

General Illustrations of Apperception.-Lloyd Morgan says1 that "As my friend and I are walking along the road, during a pause in our conversation we pass a gate at which some cattle are standing. We both begin to speak at once, and, after mutual apologies and the usual courtesies, he takes the precedence, and tells me of the Red Devons with which he has stocked a farm which he has lately purchased. When he has spoken, he asks me what I was about to say; and I laughingly reply that I was merely going to ask whether he thought certain recent promises to electors (1892) were much more likely to be fulfilled than certain other promises in 1885 concerning three acres and a cow. Now here a similar impression, the result of primary suggestion, gives rise in two different minds to two different trains of ideas. . . . There is not much difficulty in assigning, in general terms, reasons for the different results in his mind and in mine. His farm in Devonshire had been for some time a topic of thought and discussion, his mind had a constant tendency to revert to this subject. . . . Probably the farm was lurking in the background of his consciousness as he walked silently by my side. On the other hand, my own mind was, as we say, full of the elections, and of certain statements reported to have been made in Wiltshire to catch the agricultural vote. The cow appeared to me therefore in an electioneering connection. Had a butcher been with us, the cattle might well have suggested the peculiar excellence of last year's Christmas beef. Or if a student of prehistoric archæology had been there, his

1 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, p. 63.

mind, through the intervention of Bos primigenius, might have wandered to the Europe of primitive times."

Steinthal tells a story to illustrate how each person's apperceptive masses color all his mental processes. Six persons, strangers to each other, were riding together one day in a compartment railway carriage and one of them proposed to tell the vocation of all the rest if they would each write without hesitation the answer to a question which he would give them. The question was: "What destroys its own offspring?" One wrote, "Vital force," and was promptly told that he was a biologist. The second wrote "War," and was picked out as a soldier. The next was called a philologist because his answer was "Kronos." The journalist of the party had disclosed his identity by writing the word "Revolutionist," and the farmer by writing "Boar." "Each one," says Steinthal, "answers the first thing that occurs to him, and that is whatever is most nearly related to his pursuit in life. Every question is a hole-drilling experiment, and the answer is an opening through which one sees into our interiors. We are able to recognize the clergyman, the soldier, the scholar, the business man, not only by the cut of their garments and the attitude of their bodies, but by what they say and how they express it, . . . by the point of view from which they regard things, judge them, conceive them, in short by their mode of apperceiving."

Emerson wrote: "What can we see or acquire, but what we are? You have seen a skilful man reading Vergil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews tongue." According to our training, unfortunately we are apt to look upon one of the political parties as being absolutely right and the others as wholly deluded. Similarly our views of religious denominations and even moral questions are sometimes terribly warped by the example and teachings we have received. The

Hindu woman casts her babe into the Ganges to be devoured by alligators because she believes such action to be right. Her religion teaches her to do it, and frequent examples seem to justify the conclusion. The savage believes it to be right to rob or slay his enemy, while civilized nations declare against such practices.

In order to understand much of ordinary conversation it is necessary to have a large fund of information to form a background for its interpretation. The child's readers doubtless always contain innumerable common words, of which the child has no knowledge beyond their sound. Any teacher who will take the trouble to investigate may be astonished to discover that some of the most ordinary terms are practically meaningless to the children. President G. Stanley Hall in his classical study, "The Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School" (later discussed), astounded many by his revelations of the ignorance of children concerning supposedly familiar words and objects.

It is not difficult to recall illustrations showing how variously different persons look upon the same event. The artist viewing Niagara Falls goes into ecstasy over the magnificent scenery; the engineer says: "What tremendous water-power"; the geologist studies the rock strata, the force of the current, and computes the age of the earth; the farmer says: "What a waste of farming land." We are told that one lady who visited there after dilating upon the wondrous scenery turned to her boy, who she thought must be awe-struck by the grandeur, and inquired what he thought of it. Imagine her amazement when he calmly inquired: "Is that the kind of spray you spray my nose with?" In childhood one is accustomed to think that the hills he knows are so high, the valleys so deep, the rivers so broad, the buildings so large, and the people so great. He goes away for a few years, returning a grown-up, and anticipates with eagerness the reexperience of the same childhood's sensations. Alas, the disillusionment! The hills have dwindled, the valleys have been filled, the buildings have become shrunken, and the people are

so ordinary. "How changed is all!" he exclaims. "It was not thus when I was a child." But he should know that it is he who is changed. The "eternal hills" have remained practically as they were. But the new scenes and the new life which he has experienced have given him glasses colored with interpretations which he can never lay aside. Not only have the new ideas been interpreted through old ideas, but the old possessions have been modified by the new.

Children's Understanding of Words.-The incorrect use of words by children may be frequently traced to entirely erroneous ideas back of them. The wrong words substituted reveal the incorrectness or the narrowness of their apperceptive masses. The right words are not employed solely because there is no conception in the mind corresponding to them. The conceptions that are a part of the mental possession force themselves to the foreground and the words representing them are their natural expression. A child said: "Blessed are the shoemakers," etc. When he had heard the word "peace-makers," no correct idea had been gained through the word and the expression linked itself with the nearest known idea. The following mistakes illustrate the same point. A child heard the verse: "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." He rendered it thus: "A double-minded man is in the stable all the time." A child said: "An average is what a hen lays on." He had heard some one say that "a hen lays on an average one hundred eggs in a season." I said to my boy of three: "That is a freight train." "Why is it afraid?" said he. Children on first seeing snow on the ground frequently call it sugar or salt. As it floats down they hail it as feathers or as butterflies. A child on seeing a pot of ferns called it a pot of green feathers. James says the sail of a boat is called a curtain by the child. His "child of two played for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes,' having been accustomed to see his 'eggs' broken, into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocketcorkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.""

Children unreflectingly often mistake new words for those that are similar. A "guardian" is thought to be a “gardener,” a "salon" a "liquor-shop." They make many curious errors in interpreting words having a variety of meanings. They think "dressed beef" has on some sort of clothing. A class of mine were told one day that we send ministers to England and other foreign lands. One child reported the next day that we send preachers to England. The children in an upper grammar school of Berlin were asked what mountain (Berg) they had seen and all answered Pfeffenberg, the name of a beer-house near by. For all of them Berg meant a place of amusement. This, as Dr. Hall says, would cause an entire group of geographical ideas to miscarry. My children had heard us talk about picking out (selecting) goods from a catalogue. One boy of two years brought me the catalogue opened to a picture of a horse and asked me to "pick it out," expecting a real live horse to be taken out. A boy of two said: "I saw the trains unhitch." Another child asked a deaf person: "Are you blind in your ear?" A farmer's boy of ten inquired: "Will bees sting when they are not sitting?" (His experience with cross sitting hens had made him suspicious.) Other examples illustrating essentially the same mental reaction are given in the chapters on imagination and thinking.1

Perception and Apperception.-From the foregoing illustrations we clearly see that it is not alone what we gain through sensory data that determines what we shall perceive or think. The mind itself contributes the essential factors which give our perceptions significance. Though the same outward stimuli may be presented to the dog and the doctor, what each really perceives are separated by impassable chasms. The ideas which each one secures through the impressions are determined not so much by sensory data as by previous experiences-per

1 Consult, also, Caroline Le Row's English As She Is Taught, Century Co. It is made up of actual answers written by pupils in examinations. The introduction by Mark Twain does not seem at all funny when compared with the pupils' answers.