In Germany since Herbart's time Psychology has always had a great deal to say about a process called Apperception.[111] The incoming ideas or sensations are said to be 'apperceived' by 'masses' of ideas already in the mind. It is plain that the process we have been describing as perception is, at this rate, an apperceptive process. So are all recognition, classing, and naming; and passing beyond these simplest suggestions, all farther thoughts about our percepts are apperceptive processes as well. I have myself not used the word apperception because it has carried very different meanings in the history of philosophy,[112] and 'psychic reaction,' 'interpretation,' 'conception,' 'assimilation,' 'elaboration,' or simply 'thought,' are perfect synonyms for its Herbartian meaning, widely taken. It is, moreover, hardly worth while to pretend to analyze the so-called apperceptive performances beyond the first or perceptive stage, because their variations and degrees are literally innumerable. 'Apperception' is a name for the sum-total of the effects of what we have studied as association; and it is obvious that the things which a given experience will suggest to a man depend on what Mr. Lewes calls his entire psychostatical conditions, his nature and stock of ideas, or, in other words, his character, habits, memory, education, previous experience, and momentary mood. We gain no insight into what really occurs either in the mind or in the brain by calling all these things the 'apperceiving mass,' though of course this may upon occasion be convenient. On the whole I am inclined to think Mr. Lewes's term of 'assimilation' the most fruitful one yet used.[113]
Professor H. Steinthal has analyzed apperceptive processes with a sort of detail which is simply burdensome.[114] His introduction of the matter may, however, be quoted. He begins with an anecdote from a comic paper.
"In the compartment of a railway-carriage six persons unknown to each other sit in lively conversation. It becomes a matter of regret that one of the company must alight at the next station. One of the others says that he of all things prefers such a meeting with entirely unknown persons, and that on such occasions he is accustomed neither to ask who or what his companions may be nor to tell who or what he is. Another thereupon says that he will undertake to decide this question, if they each and all will answer him an entirely disconnected question. They began. He drew five leaves from his note-book, wrote a question on each, and gave one to each of his companions with the request that he write the answer below. When the leaves were returned to him, he turned, after reading them, without hesitation to the others, and said to the first, 'You are a man of science'; to the second, 'You are a soldier'; to the third, 'You are a philologer'; to the fourth, 'You are a journalist'; to the fifth, 'You are a farmer.' All admitted that he was right, whereupon he got out and left the five behind. Each wished to know what question the others had received; and behold, he had given the same question to each. It ran thus:
"'What being destroys what it has itself brought forth?'
"To this the naturalist had answered, 'vital force'; the soldier, 'war'; the philologist, 'Kronos'; the publicist, 'revolution'; the farmer, 'a boar'. This anecdote, methinks, if not true, is at least splendidly well invented. Its narrator makes the journalist go on to say: 'Therein consists the joke. Each one answers the first thing that occurs to him,[115] and that is whatever is most newly 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.'... So do we all. We are all 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 body, but by what they say and how they express it. We guess the place in life of men by the interest which they show and the way in which they show it, by the objects of which they speak, by the point of view from which they regard things, judge them, conceive them, in short by their mode of apperceiving....
"Every man has one group of ideas which relate to his own person and interests, and another which is connected with society. Each has his group of ideas about plants, religion, law, art, etc., and more especially about the rose, epic poetry, sermons, free trade, and the like. Thus the mental content of every individual, even of the uneducated and of children, consists of masses or circles of knowledge of which each lies within some larger circle, alongside of others similarly included, and of which each includes smaller circles within itself.... The perception of a thing like a horse... is a process between the present horse's picture before our eyes, on the one hand, and those fused or interwoven pictures and ideas of all the horses we have ever seen, on the other;... a process between two factors or momenta, of which one existed before the process and was an old possession of the mind (the group of ideas, or concept, namely), whilst the other is but just presented to the mind, and is the immediately supervening factor (the sense-impression). The former apperceives the latter; the latter is apperceived by the former. Out of their combination an apperception-product arises: the knowledge of the perceived being as a horse. The earlier factor is relatively to the later one active and a priori; the supervening factor is given, a posteriori, passive.... We may then define Apperception as the movement of two masses of consciousness (Vorstellungsmassen) against each other so as to produce a cognition.
"The a priori factor we called active, the a posteriori factor passive, but this is only relatively true.... Although the a priori moment commonly shows itself to be the more powerful, apperception-processes can perfectly well occur in which the new observation transforms or enriches the apperceiving group of ideas. A child who hitherto has seen none but four-cornered tables apperceives a round one as a table; but by this the apperceiving mass ('table') is enriched. To his previous knowledge of tables comes this new feature that they need not be four-cornered, but may be round. In the history of science it has happened often enough that some discovery, at the same time that it was apperceived, i.e. brought into connection with the system of our knowledge, transformed the whole system. In principle, however, we must maintain that, although either factor is both active and passive, the a priori factor is almost always the more active of the two."[116]
This account of Steinthal's brings out very clearly the difference between our psychological conceptions and what are called concepts in logic. In logic a concept is unalterable; but what are popularly called our 'conceptions of things' alter by being used. The aim of 'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors. Every new experience must be disposed of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My 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 pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account of at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them.[117] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pen-drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture, says to him: "And is it really all done by hand?"
IS PERCEPTION UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE?
A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helmholtz, and lately interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet)[118] will have it that perception should be called a sort of reasoning operation, more or less unconsciously and automatically performed. The question seems at first a verbal one, depending on how broadly the term reasoning is to be taken. If, every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to our mind, we make an inference; and if every time we make an inference we reason; then perception is indubitably reasoning. Only one sees no room in it for any unconscious part. Both associates, the present sign and the contiguous things which it suggests, are above-board, and no intermediary ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the thesis in question have, however, made a more complex supposition. What they have meant is that perception is a mediate inference, and that the middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called 'this' ([p. 83], supra) is felt, they think that some process like the following runs through the mind:
'This' is M;
but M is A;
therefore 'this' is A.[119]
Now there seem no good grounds for supposing this additional wheelwork in the mind. The classification of 'this' as M is itself an act of perception, and should, if all perception were inference, require a still earlier syllogism for its performance, and so backwards in infinitum. The only extrication from this coil would be to represent the process in altered guise, thus:
'This' is like those;
Those are A;
Therefore 'this' is A.