Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's IdealsJames, William
Science
Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
James, William
College students -- Conduct of life; Educational psychology; Teachers -- Professional ethics
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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