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.