Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/44

 26 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

ments appear changed in form; original constituents of the sensation are left out, and some which were originally not there are added. To what extent this process goes on in the consciously impressed perceptual image and how inex act the reproduction is as against the requirement of abso lute agreement &quot; J recent investigations have strikingly dem onstrated. Indeed such an exact reproduction would not be consistent with the practical purpose of the image. It would violate the law of mental economy. Were it so, the memory would soon be burdened with a mass of useless and therefore meaningless details, which would gradually impede action until the mental life would be paralyzed by a plethora of valueless material.

Selection is the characteristic of the action of intelligence. From the countless number of details of actual experience it selects for reproduction in images and organization in memory those which seem to be worth while, i.e., which seem to be useful in the further ordering of experience. In each act of reproduction there is present a controlling inter est which determines the selection of details. This is true, as we have just seen, in involuntary, and is especially true in voluntary, reproduction. This holds good of the professional historian as well as of the story-teller, though in the two cases the interest is different. With the historian that inter est is objective truth. If he is true to his proper task, he is aiming to reproduce past events in their actual relations and significance, not to prove a proposition or to produce a given effect upon his reader or hearer. But he can not hope to reproduce experience as it took place in detail; he must select, because it is practically impossible to reproduce experience in all its details, and if it were practicable it would be of no value even for his objective purpose, which is to gather up facts and give a literary reproduction of them in their significant relations, so that they may serve as a guide in further social action. He therefore leaves out all that is not necessary to give the significant occurrences of the

1 Elsenhans, &quot; Lehrbuch der Psychologic/ p. 169.

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