James, William (1842-1910)

Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals

New York

Henry Holt and Company

1892, 1899

"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas."

In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law makes itself felt,—the law of economy. In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We bate anything absolutely new, anything without any name, and for which a new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain; an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato; an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar Hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the Polynesians called Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr. Rooper has written a little book on apperception, to which he gives the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers," that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never seen ferns before.
(Chapter 14)

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Reading

William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899).

Lectures given in 1892. <Link to 1901 edition in Google Books>

01/10/2019