Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A manual of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![§6] produce changes in our environment, these changes and their foreseen results form part of our total object, the attainment of the end we are aiming at. In all cases, there are processes of interpreting, identifying, classifying, recog¬ nising, etc., by which the object is brought into relation with the results of previous experience as retained and organised in pre-formed mental dispositions. In this way what is fragmentary in it is supplemented and expanded, links of connection are supplied for its relatively uncon¬ nected parts, and the whole is fitted into its place in the pre-acquired system of knowledge, belief and imagination. The general name applied by psychologists to such processes is Apperception. Apperception is involved in all distinct perception and especially in all attentive perception. When we see the wet ground, its wetness is not an original datum of sight, but one of touch. Its connexion with a peculiar visual appearance has been learned in previous experience. When a thing looks smooth, all that is given merely through visual sensation is the lustre or sheen of the surface; the smoothness is primarily perceived by touch and comes to be connected with the visible appear¬ ance through association. In general, when we look at any thing only one side of it is visible, the other side is not seen but suggested. When we say that we hear someone’s footstep on the stair, all that we are aware of through the ear alone is a sound of a certain kind ; that the sound is due to a footstep, that the footstep is that of some particular person, and that it is on the stair, all this is an interpreta¬ tion based on previous experience. These are obvious cases; but it is a main part of the business of psychology to show the same process at work where it is by no means so obvious, to show how very little, comparatively speaking, can be ascribed to the original data of sense and how much is due to apperception. One](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b31344951_0171.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
