How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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the mental life we have developed an apparatus com¬ parable to the senses of sight, touch, and smell, whose purpose is to pre-view and pre-examine every experience to test its fitness for assimilation in * the mosaic pattern of our style of life. This apparatus we call “ the scheme of apperception ”. It is the psychic yardstick which we acquire for the purpose of avoiding all experiences that cannot be assimilated into our pattern of conduct. Suppose a piece of beef-steak is served to you. Your senses and your experiences teach you that this is appropriate food. Your next step is to take this material and reduce it, by the processes of mastication and digestion, to its least common units, which in this case, are the so-called amino-acids. The amino-acids are the units which compose the complex protein molecules called beef. Although human protein contains the very same amino-acids as beef protein, it contains them in slightly different proportions. It is necessary, therefore, in the process of assimilation, to break the complicated beef protein molecule down into its constituent amino- acids and remove only such percentages of each of the constituents as are necessary for the formation of human protein. This process is called assimilation. An analogous process of psychic assimilation occurs in the mental sphere when you come in contact with a new experience. Your first act is to pre-view and pre-determine whether the experience is fitting to your pattern by measuring it with your psychic scheme of apperception. If the experience seems fairly appropriate, you break it up and remove that part of it that fits into your dynamic pattern, and reject the remainder, exactly as the left-overs of the amino-acids of the beef protein are excreted after digestion in the form of urine and faeces. How We “ Make ” Our Experience This process of pre-viewing and testing our experiences goes on quietly and unconsciously during our entire lives. When a crisis arises we are prepared for it by virtue of this training. You have no doubt seen men and women who