so
as to form new or improved conceptions.

XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS

The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be,
visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or
concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word.
That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or
context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_.
They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its
type or class. In this undated condition, we call them products of
'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used
where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing.
Conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our
present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit
myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word
'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these
be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Julius Caesar,' or classes of
things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract
attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.'

The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as
experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I
used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting
slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many
ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him
associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child
eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are
little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired
ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind,
are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when
we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four
quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two
conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be
described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of
them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of
life. The lack of education means only the failur