110 PSYGHOLOOY. 



of under some old head. Tlie great point is to find the head 

 which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polyne- 

 sian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them 

 pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played 

 for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling 

 it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes,' 

 having been accustomed to see his ' eggs ' broken into a 

 glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocket- 

 corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly 

 any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh expe- 

 riences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to 

 the stock conceptions with which we have once become 

 familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impres- 

 sions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the 

 inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects 

 which violate our established habits of ' apperception ' are 

 simply not taken account of at all ; or, if on some occasion 

 we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, 

 twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, 

 and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished 

 from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than 

 the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. 



On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from 

 oabyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate 

 the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or 

 burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes 

 in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old 

 friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new 

 is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for 

 it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before 

 the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither 

 curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us 

 that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by 

 which to measure them.* The Fuegians, in Darwin's voy- 



* The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowl- 

 '■edge on to a pre-existing curiosity — i.e., to assimilate its matter in some 

 way to wliat is already known. Hence the advantage of " comparing all 

 that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the 

 unknown plain by the example of the known, and of connecting all the 

 instruction with the personal experience of the pupil. ... If the teacher la 



