344 PSYCHOLOGY. 



thinghood only as a whole. '" In this vague way, probably, 

 does the room ajjpear to the babe who first begins to be 

 conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. 

 It has no subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the 

 window is able to attract his separate notice. In this vague 

 wa}^ certainly, does every entirely new experience appear 

 to the adult. A library, a museum, a machine-shop, are 

 mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the machin- 

 ist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly no- 

 tice the whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the 

 details. Familiarity has in them bred discrimination. 

 Such vague terms as ' grass,' ' mould,' and ' meat ' do not 

 exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know too 

 much about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain per- 

 son said to Charles Kingslej", who was showing him the dis- 

 section of a caterpillar, with its exquisite viscera, " Why, I 

 thought it was nothing but skin and squash!" A layman 

 present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire is helpless. Dis- 

 crimination has been so little awakened in him by expe- 

 rience tliat his consciousness leaves no single point of the 

 complex situation accented aud standing out for him to be- 

 gin to act upon. But the sailor, the fireman, and the gen- 

 eral know directly at what corner to take up the business. 

 They * see into the situation ' — that is, they analyze it — with 

 their first glance. It is full of delicately differenced ingre- 

 dients which their education has little by little brought to 

 their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no clear 

 idea. 



How this power of analysis was brought about we saw 

 in our chapters on Discrimination and Attention. We dis- 

 sociate the elements of originally vague totals by attending 

 to them or noticing them alternately, of course. But what 

 determines which element we shall attend to first ? There 

 are two immediate and obvious answers : first, our practical 

 or instinctive interests ; and, second, our aesthetic interests. 

 The dog singles out of any situation its smells, and the horse 

 its sounds, bcause they may reveal facts of practical mo- 

 ment, and are instinctively exciting to these several crea- 



* See above, p. 8. 



