eve that in the
majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.

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,