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nd teachers should find in it a constant antidote to faulty methods. Apperception may be roughly defined at first as the process of _acquiring new ideas by the aid of old ideas_ already in the mind. It makes the acquisition of new knowledge easier and quicker. Not that there is any easy road to learning, but there is a natural process which greatly accelerates the progress of acquisition, just as it is better to follow a highway over a rough country than to betake one's self to the stumps and brush. For example, if one is familiar with peaches, apricots will be quickly understood as a kindred kind of fruit, even though a little strange. A person who is familiar with electrical machinery will easily interpret the meaning and purpose of every part of a new electrical plant. One may _perceive_ a new object without understanding it, but to _apperceive_ it is to interpret its meaning by the aid of similar familiar notions. If one examines a _typewriter_ for the first time, it will take some pains and effort to understand its construction and use; but after examining a Remington, another kind will be more easily understood, because the principle of the first interprets that of the second. Suppose the _Steppes of Russia_ are mentioned for the first time to a class. The word has little or no meaning or perhaps suggests erroneously a succession of stairs. But we remark that the steppes are like the prairies and plains to the west of the Mississippi river, covered with grass and fed on by herds. By awakening a familiar notion already in the mind and bringing it distinctly to the front, the new thing is easily understood. Again, a boy goes to town and sees a _banana_ for the first time, and asks, "What is that? I never saw anything like that." He thinks he has no class of things to which it belongs, no place to put it. His father answers that it is to eat like an orange or a pear, and its significance is at once plain by the reference to something familiar. Again, two men, the one a _machinist_ and the other an observer unskilled in machines, visit the machinery hall of an exposition. The machinist observes a new invention and finds in it a new application of an old principle. As he passes along from one machine to another he is much interested in noting new devices and novel appliances and at the end of an hour he leaves the hall with a mind enriched. The other observer sees the same machines and their parts,
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