desires _is_ what we want.
The importance of reflective thinking is precisely that it helps
us to secure those satisfactions. To surrender to every random
impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither
satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to
the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares.
If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the
rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to
abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result
would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we
simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the
consequences we can foresee. To thus guide and control action
makes us genuinely free.

If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, they
are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice,
or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered,
unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the
person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 67.]

Instincts and habits are fixed responses; being placed in
such and such circumstances we _must_ do such and such things.
Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our own
thinking are we masters of our environment rather than
mechanically controlled by it.

THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR. Reflection
in the life of the individual insures that he will not become the
slave of his own habits. He will regard habits as methods
to be followed when they produce good results, to be discarded
or modified when they do not. But if habit in the life of the
individual needs control lest it become dangerously controlling,
it needs it more conspicuously still in the life of the group.
Unless the individuals that compose a society are alert and
conscious of the bearings of their actions, they will be
completely and mechanically controlled by the customs to which
they have been exposed in the early periods of their lives.
What an individual regards as right or wrong, what he will
cherish or champion in industry, government, and art, depends
in large measure on his early education and training
and on the opinions and beliefs of other people with whom he
repeatedly comes in contact. A society may be democratic
in its political form and still autocratic in fact if the majority
of its citizens are merely machines which can be set off