s more and
more ideational. With increasing age, a larger and larger percentage of
our mental life is made up of ideas, of memories. The child lives in the
present, in a world of perceptions. A man is not so much tied down to
the present; he lives in memory and anticipation. He thinks more than
does the child. A man is content to sit down in his chair and think for
hours at a time, a child is not. This thinking is the passing of ideas,
now one, then another and another. These ideas are the survivals or
revivals of our past experience. The order of their coming depends on
our past experience.

As I sit here and write, there surge up out of my past, ideas of creeks
and rivers and hills, horses and cows and dogs, boys and girls, men and
women, work and play, school days, friends,--an endless chain of ideas.
This "flow" of ideas is often started by a perception. For
illustration, I see a letter on the table, a letter from my brother. I
then have a visual image of my brother. I think of him as I saw him
last. I think of what he said. I think of his children, of his home, of
his boyhood, and our early life together. Then I think of our mother and
the old home, and so on and on. Presently I glance at a history among my
books, and immediately think of Greece and Athens and the Acropolis,
Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, schoolmates and teachers, and friends
connected in one way or another with my college study of Greek.

In this description of the process of thinking, I have repeatedly used
the words "think of." I might have said instead, "there came to mind
ideas of Athens, ideas of friends," etc. Thinking, then, is a general
term for our idea-life.

Reasoning is a form of thinking. Reasoning, too, is a flow of ideas. But
while reasoning is thinking, it is a special form of thinking; it is
thinking to a purpose. In thinking as above described and illustrated,
no immediate ends of the person are served; while in reasoning some end
is always sought. In reasoning, the flow of ideas must reach some
particular idea that will serve the need of the moment, the need of the
problem at hand. Reasoning, then, is controlled thinking, thinking
centering about a problem, about a situation that one must meet.

The statement that reasoning is _controlled_ thinking needs some
explanation, for the reader at once is likely to want to know what does
the controlling. There is not some special faculty or power that does
the controlling. The cont