tions later. Thinking is an
outgrowth of spontaneous activity; reasoning is but an application of
the natural laws of mental activity to certain situations.

The laws of readiness, exercise, and effect govern thinking just as they
do all other mental processes. Thinking is not independent of habit; it
is not a mysterious force other than association which deals with novel
data. Thinking is merely an exhibition of the laws of habit under
certain definite situations. At first sight this seems to be impossible,
because, as has been emphasized throughout this chapter, thinking takes
place when no satisfactory response is at hand and when nothing is
offered by past experience which is adequate. As a result of the
thinking, responses are reached which never before have occurred as a
result of that situation. Just the same they are reached only because of
the operation of the laws of habit. It must be borne in mind that the
laws of association do not work in such a way that only gross total
situations are bound to total responses. In man particularly, situations
are being continually broken up into elements, and those elements
connected with responses. Responses are being continually disintegrated,
and elements, instead of the whole response, being bound to situations.
Analysis is continually taking place merely as a result of the working
of these laws. If the nervous mechanism of man were not of this
hair-trigger variety, if elements did not emerge from a total complex as
a result of bonds formed, of readiness of certain tracts, no willing, no
attention on the part of the thinker, would ever bring about analysis.
This is made very vivid when one is met by a problem he cannot solve. If
the situation does not break up, if the right element does not emerge,
if the right cue is not given, he is helpless. All he can do is to hold
fast to his problem and wait. As the associations are offered, he can
select and reject, but that is all. The marvelous power of the genius,
the inventor, the reasoner in all fields, is merely an exhibition of the
laws of association working with extremely subtle elements. It seems to
transcend all experience because these elements and the bonds which
experience has formed cannot be observed. A child fails in his thinking
often because he uses his past experience and responds by analogy--we
note that fact and criticize him for it. But he succeeds for just the
same reason and by the use of just the same law