e broadening Floss hurries on between its
green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it,
checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.

Can you see and feel the elements of this picture! You have never
experienced a tide river? Never mind! There is enough in the picture
which _is_ familiar to your actual senses through experience to brace
your imagination for a grasp of the unfamiliar elements. The wide plain,
the river hurrying between green banks--no apperceptive background fails
thus far in the picture. What do we mean by apperceptive background? Let
us investigate for a moment the psychology involved in the art of
"making pictures." Let us get back of this word-picture. Rather let us
stay this side of it. Look at the page before you not with the inner eye
of your imagination, but with the outer eye--the eye which is merely
the organ of the sense of sight. Use your eye as a physical sense only.
What does your eye carry to your mind when you look at this page? "Black
letters grouped into words on a white surface." Did you get all these
qualities at once? Yes, because you have seen other printed pages. Can
you wipe out of your mind your knowledge of paper, print, and words? Can
you imagine looking on such a page as this for the first
time--_perceiving_ it for the first time? If you can do this you will
arrive at an understanding of apperceptive background through its
elimination. You will realize, that all that is in the back of your
mind, stored there by its previous acquaintance with other printed
pages, makes up the apperceptive background by which you get a
conception of this page. That conception comes first through your
physical sense of sight. You may perceive also through touch, through
feeling, for instance, the quality of paper. But all that you perceive
in this initial process,--the stimulus which comes through the physical
senses, yields little to the complete conception as compared with the
yield of your so-called _mental senses_. It is when you have fully
apperceived the object that your conception is complete. It is when you
have brought to bear upon this page (still looked upon, remember, merely
as a printed page regardless of the matter behind the print) all your
previous knowledge,--it is when you have observed that the paper is of
good quality, that the page is closely set, that the print is excellent,
that the margin is wide,--it is when you have compared it in memory with