APPREHENSION (Lat. ad, to; prehendere, to seize)

This article appears in Volume V02, Page 227 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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APPREHENSION (Lat. ad, to; prehendere, to seize) , in psychology, a

term

TERM

applied to a mode of consciousness in which nothing is affirmed or denied of the

object

OBJECT

in question, but the mind is merely aware of (" seizes ") it. " Judgment " (says Reid, ed. Hamilton, i. p. 414) " is an act of the mind specifically different from simple apprehension or the

bare

BARE

conception of a thing "; and again, " Simple apprehension or conception can neither be true nor false." This distinction provides for the large class of mental acts in which we are simply aware of or " take in " a number of

familiar

FAMILIAR (through the Fr. familier, from Lat. familiaris, of or belonging to the familia, family)

objects, about which we in general make no judgment unless our attention is suddenly called by a new feature. Or again two alternatives may be apprehended without any resultant judgment as to their respective merits. Similarly G. F. Stout points out that while we have a very vivid

idea

IDEA (Gr. Ibia, connected with i&eiv, to see; cf. Lat. species from specere, to look at)

of a

character

CHARACTER (Gr. xapareri7p, from xap&crew, to scratch)

or an incident in a

work

WORK

of fiction, we can hardly be said in any real sense to have any
belief or to make any judgment as to its existence or truth. With this mental state may be compared the purely aesthetic contemplation of music, wherein apart from, say, a false

note

NOTE
NOTE (Lat. nota, mark, sign, from noscere, to know)

, the faculty of judgment is for the time inoperative. To these examples may be added the fact that one can fully understand an

argument

ARGUMENT

in all its bearings without in any way judging its validity.
Without going into the question fully, it
may be pointed out that the distinction
between judgment and apprehension is relative.
In every

kind

KIND (O. E. ge-cynde, from the same root as is seen in " kin," supra)

of thought there is judgment of
some sort in a greater or less degree of
prominence. Judgment and thought are in
fact psychologically distinguishable merely as
different, though correlative, activities of con-
sciousness. Professor Stout further investigates the phenomena
of apprehension, and comes to the conclusion that " it is possible
to distinguish and identify a whole without apprehending any of
its constituent details." On the other hand, if the attention

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