omes to have more and more meanings as our experience with it
increases. When we meet something new, it may have practically no
meaning. Suppose we find a new plant in the woods. It has little
meaning. We may be able to say only that it is a plant, or it is a small
plant. We touch it and it pricks us, and it at once has more meaning. It
is a plant that pricks. We bite into it and find it bitter. It is then a
plant that is bitter, etc. In such a way, objects come to have meaning.
They acquire meaning according to the connections in which we experience
them and they may take on different meanings for different persons
because of the different experiences of these persons. The chief
interest we have in objects is in what use we can make of them, how we
can make them serve our purposes, how we can make them contribute to our
pleasure.

The organization of experience is the connecting, through the process of
association, of the ideas that arise out of our experience. Our ideas
are organized not only in accordance with the way we experience them in
the first place, but in accordance with the way we think them later in
memory. Of course, ideas are recalled in accordance with the way we
experience them, but since they are experienced in such a multitude of
connections, they are recalled later in these various connections and it
is possible in recall to repeat one connection to the exclusion of
others.

Organization can therefore be a selective process. Although "horse" is
experienced in a great variety of situations or connections, for our
purposes we can select some one or more of these connections and by
repetition in recalling it, strengthen these connections to the
exclusion of others. Herein lies one of the greatest possibilities in
thinking and reasoning, which enables us, to an extent, to be
independent of original experience. We must have had experience, of
course, but the strength of bonds between ideas need not depend upon
original experience, but rather upon the way in which these ideas are
recalled later, and especially upon the number of times they are
recalled.

It is in the matter of the organization of experience that teachers and
parents can be of great help to young people. Children do not know what
connections of ideas will be most useful in the future. People who have
had more experience know better and can, by direction and suggestion,
lead the young to form, and strengthen by repetition, those connectio