1 84 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



To argue the obvious a little more fully, if a pattern is observable in 

 behaviour, it must be dependent either upon the detailed events themselves, 

 or upon the organism. In many cases, such as the behaviour of insects 

 or nest-building in birds, there seems to be no sense in the first alternative, 

 and consequently we take the patterns to be determined by the nature 

 of the organism. This is to assert that the pattern is latent in the organism. 

 But not after the manner of a blue-print. The latent pattern is not open 

 to inspection. It exists, to use an old and respectable term, formally. 

 There is a character of the organism which gives a distinctive pattern to 

 its reactions. But there are also patterns observable in acquired activities, 

 and in this case we have an everyday term to designate the quality of the 

 agent which produces it. We call it a skill, and regard it as inherent in 

 the subject whether he is or is not engaged in the activity at the moment. 

 But once more it is not inspectable as the pattern of the activity is. All 

 we can observe is that A by economical and coherent actions consistently 

 achieves success in a given field, while B as consistently fails in it. Believing 

 that all phenomena have a cause, we ascribe to A a skill which B lacks. 

 So far as language goes, we can say either that A is skilled or that he 

 possesses a skill. Both expressions are admissible, but I would suggest 

 that the former is better in psychology, since we can neither observe, 

 nor by deduction describe a skill in itself. When we attempt to do so we 

 usually find ourselves describing again the pattern of the activity. Let 

 us take a skill to be a character of the individual, a manner in which he 

 has been psychologically shaped by racial or individual experience. 

 To say that a person is skilled means that he is prepared to deal ade- 

 quately with situations of a particular kind, but prepared in an outline, 

 flexible manner which is sensitive to the varying details of the moment. 

 Skill is in this respect on a higher plane than tropism, reflex or habit. 

 The organism's skill is displayed in controlling and organising material 

 on the way to achieving a goal. 



Now we can return to our original problem of perception. No present- 

 day psychologist can be content to regard perceiving as no more than 

 reflecting the material world, or as a process to be studied in isolation. 

 It is a preparatory reaction, prior to more far-reaching activities, its im- 

 mediate goal being the organisation of sensory data into manageable forms. 

 So we come to the conclusion that the predetermined ' ways of seeing ' 

 of which Rubin spoke to us belong to the vast family of skills, and can 

 be treated with the others. The range of processes in which the pattern 

 of behaviour, and the pattern resulting from the behaviour, depend upon 

 the mental characteristics of the agent would appear to cover the whole 

 extent of human life. At the London Meeting in 1931 I read a paper 

 advancing the hypothesis that what is termed conceptual thinking can 

 be dealt with in terms of skill, saying that what are termed concepts are 

 best considered as outline preparations for response, and not as mental 

 entities. I endeavoured to show that the behaviour of animals displays 

 patterns parallel with those of a higher grade in human beings. I intro- 

 duced the term schematic preparation, or more shortly ' schema,' as a 

 name for this subjective character (1). Prof. Bartlett has also used the 

 term, with greater profit than myself, and I quote from him a good state- 

 ment of what the word is taken to mean. ' " Schema " refers to an active 



