CHAPTER II HOW MISUNDERSTANDINGS ARISE Double Apperception. Of figures. You have doubtless been impressed by the very great differences between men in respect to the value which they attach to the same object. Hughes, in apologizing for Tom Brown's strange infatuation for Miss Patty, remarks, There is no accounting of tastes, and it is fortunate that some like apples and some onions. You may, perhaps, get a hint as to why one person shou be so ravished by an object to which others are indiffere by examining Figure 6, the picture on page 16. What we have here is a situation which yields to double interpretation. Similar situations, equally susceptible of double interpretation, are often met, as the following illustrations show. Figure 7 can be seen as a duck's head or as a rabbit's head. Figure 8 can be apperceived as a frustum of a pyramid with the smaller base either toward you or away from you, according as you look for one result or the other. Figure 9 is a plane figure with zigzag lines, a set of stairs from above, or a set of stairs from beneath. Figure 10 can be seen as a set of six cubes with their shaded bases above, or as a set of seven cubes with their shaded bases below. Into each of the following frameworks of words you can put any one of several meanings: Now in these simple situations you have a clue to most of life's misunderstandings. They are only double interpretations of situations which yield themselves to two ways "fng taken. And you can learn how to estimate and to of them from a study of the psychology of these trifling lanation. Why, then, is it that you can see in the objective presentation several different meanings? It it FIG. 7. is because, as we learned in our last chapter, you never see anything merely as it is in itself. You always contribute something out of your own mind by way of interpretation. You do not merely perceive it, but apperceive it. This you do by bringing to it, as we have learned, a preperception of an expectation of what it is to be. And now the reason why you can get several meanings out of the same objective situation is that you bring different preperceptions to it. Thus the frustum of the pyramid you can see with the small base toward you if you shape your preperception in that way, or with the small base away from you if in that way. So you can see the stairs as from above if you throw your mind into the right mold in advance, or as from below if you screw your mental framework, before approaching с the diagram, into that bias. When you shift pretation to another you are aware of gat And so here, in our study of apperception, we go a step beyond that of the last chapter. There we learned that what a thing means to us is determined very largely by what is in our own minds by reason of our past experience. But now we see that the apperception is due not only to what we have experienced, but to what we, at the moment, have in mind. When we bring one mass" of conscious rather, when our con 66 FIG. 9. sciousness is organized about one pivot" or focus," we apperceive in one way; when organized about another focus," in a different way. Any situation is thus capable of having quite different meanings to different persons, or Copied, by permission, from Witmer's Analytic Psychology. even to the same person at different times, according to the way in which it is apperceived. Of nature. A conversation of Polonius and the mad Hamlet illustrates this possibility of change of mode of apperception with its resultant change of meaning: Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel? Polonius. By the mass, and 'tis a camel indeed. Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius. It is backed like a weasel. Polonius. Very like a whale. In a little poem, "The Artist and the Poet," Miss Wieand portrays the very different values found in the same land |