AP'PREHEN'SION (Lat. apprchensio, a setting upon, grasping, understanding, from ad, to iwchendere, to seize). A term denoting the subjective aspect of perception and imagination, as presentation and representation denote their objective side. Two special uses of the word may be noticed. (1) The phrase "direct appre hension" is employed for the habitual recogni tion of objects and persons whose presence in our surroundings is a matter of course. We do not, in strictness, "recognize" the clothes that we put on every morning, the pen with which we write, the 'familiar faces of our household ; there is no trace of associative supplementing, or of any well-marked mood of familiarity. Rather, we apprehend them directly. Their look and touch set up a certain bodily attitude, the atti tude of easy "at-homeness": and it is the vague, ill-defined mood of "at-homeness" which mediates the recognition (q.v.). (2) Stout has carried this reduction a step further, in his doctrine of "implicit apprehension." "It is possible," he says, "to distinguish and identify a whole with out apprehending any of its constituent details." It is possible, e.g., to understand the meaning of a word—something that stands for a highly com plex combination—without any mental imagery whatsoever; the meaning is implicitly appre hended by an imageless thought. There is some
thing fascinating about this assumption of "a mode of presentational consciousness which is not composed of visual, auditory, taetual, and other experiences derived from and in some de gree resembling in quality the sensations of the special senses," yet which possesses "a repre sentative value or significance for thought"; but its assumption is unnecessary. By the law of exclusion (see ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS), the middle terms of a train of ideas may drop out, with frequent repetition; so that the idea x, which was at first mediated by abed, is now called up by a alone, without the intervention of bed. So the sound, or articulatory "feel," or sight of the word might come. in time, to carry the meaning which had originally been carried by associated images. Moreover, there can be no understanding, even of the most familiar word, without the arousal of the mood of "at home," with its constituent organic sensations; and there can be little doubt that these are the real vehicle of the word's meaning. Consult: 0. F. Stout, Analytic Psychology (London, 1896) ; E.
B. Titchener, Outlines of Psychology (New York, 1902).