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,