e 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, 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