apperception

In philosophy, a term introduced by Gottfried Leibniz to denote the process by which the mind gets hold of the ‘perceptions’ of sense and turns them into conscious knowledge.

Immanuel Kant speaks of the transcendental and synthetic unity of apperception: the former is tantamount to self-consciousness, the very thing that gives meaning to a set of empirical experiences as belonging jointly to one experiencing self; the latter to the process of that self as consciously combining its perceptions. The German philosopher Johann Herbart (1776–1841) used this concept in his theory of knowledge, apperception being the process which creates systematic order out of what is presented to the mind. It is on this that all learning activity is based, and he develops his educational psychology accordingly.