In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception codified, and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way so delightful to the pedagogic eye.  In one book which I remember reading there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from each other.  There was associative apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen.  It is needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as ‘written for the use of teachers.’  The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed ‘processes’ with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence.

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.