Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/818

798, expressing conflicting opinions from precisely the same data. (3ne part of the testimony will attach itself to some former experience in the case of a certain judge. That testimony may thereby become powerfully swayed by that association, and may therefore assume undue importance. Other testimony may not receive sufficient attention, because there was no associated factor to intensify the impression. A jury is especially exposed to such deflections. If there is a damage suit over injury to a child, any jurymen who have children will be peculiarly sensitive to testimony showing carelessness on the part of the one who occasioned the injury, and peculiarly deaf to testimony establishing the fact that the child's own fault was responsible for the harm. In general, less important truths with a powerful attachment to something in our own experience will completely overshadow those more important with no such association. No one can forecast how many truths will affect certain people until he knows what associated ideas these truths have to contend with.

The association of ideas goes so far as even to affect the way in which we perceive things. A passing bird may be perceived, or, as some people prefer to say, "apperceived," by a lady as an ornament to her bonnet; by a fruit-grower as an insect-killer; by a poet as a songster; by an artist as a fine bit of coloring and form. The housewife may apperceive old rags as something to be thrown away; a rag-picker, as something to be gathered up. A carpenter, walking in a forest, would see the trees as possible sticks of timber. A botanist would notice the shapes of the leaves. A hunter would have an eye for coverts for game. A fisherman would regard the stream flowing through the wood as a good place for trout. An ornithologist would have an ear for the birds. A man's profession can soon be detected by the way he perceives things. The truths of our world are determined by what we see, and ''we for the most part see only those things which we can join to something in our own line of experience. All other things do not exist for us. Their truths are not a part of our world.'' After we have perceived a thing, the brain probably never returns to its former state. Any new perception will feel the deflecting force of former perceptions. A butcher and a cloth manufacturer perceive a sheep in an entirely different way. If their perceptions have differed, it is impossible for two persons to see a new thing in precisely the same way. It is of the utmost importance for success in life that this truth be fully apprehended. Men succeed in proportion to their fullness of understanding their fellow-men and influencing them. Educated persons ought to expect different men to look at the same thing in different ways, and the intelligent should be constantly prepared to meet such cases. If psychology is to have practical worth, such