Human Traits and their Social Significance

rform it. Willy-nilly he withdraws his hand from fire, eats when hungry, and sleeps when tired. In the case of habits, once they are acquired, he is also largely dominated by circumstances beyond his

gutter when a practical joker called "Attention"; the pathetic plight of the superannuated business man who is totally at

ntrol our actions. Instead of performing actions as immediate and automatic responses to accustomed stimuli, we may determine our actions, single or consecutive, in the light of

iate response to a present stimulus. But an act (or a series of acts) reflectively performed is performed in the light of the results that are prophetically associated with them. In the case of instinct and habit, the individual almost literally does not know what he is about. In reflective activity he does know, and the mor

the habitual response will bring the usual satisfaction. Walking, dressing, getting to familiar places, finding the electric button in well-known rooms, opening often-opened combinations-these operations are all adequately accomplished by the fixed mechanisms of habit. But we meet as frequently with novel situations where the accustomed or instinctive reactions will not bri

tinctive tendencies into habits more adequate to their conditions. The more economical and effective process, one peculiar to human beings, is that of reflection. To think or to reflect means to postpone response to a given problematic situation until the possible consequences of the possible responses have been mentally traced out. Instead of actually making every response that

differences in temperament. But part of the process of reflection is, as we shall see in the chapter on "Science and Scie

d as a means to achieving the satisfaction sought? Instead of going through every random course of action that suggests itself, each one is "dramat

first immediate impulse he would, before he realized it, be off for an evening's entertainment. But instead of responding immediately, dropping his books, reaching for his hat, opening the door, and ringing for the eleva

will be discussed in detail in the chap

rather, are foreseen-failure in the examination, the loss of a scholarship, pain to one's family or friends, and chagrin at the frustration of one's deepest and most permanent ideals. The second course of action, to stay at home and study, though it is seen to have connected with it certain immediate privations, is foreseen to involve the further consequences of passing the examination, keeping one's scholarship, and maintaining certain personal or intellectual standards one has set one's self. Even if the student decides to follow the first course of action to which an immediate impulse has prompted him, his act is different in quality from what it would have been i

inatively foreseen, it is often necessary to institute a very elaborate system of connecting links between an immediately suggested course of action and its not at all obvious results. "Thinking a thing out" involves precisely this introduction of connecting links, or "middle terms," between what is immediately given or suggested and what necessarily, though by no

by the four years' training, and highly value the results of it. He may think, however, that the training involves an obligation to serve in the army; it may mean, for a long

ntial feature of reflective activity is that it is action performed in the light of consequences foreseen in imagination. Physical stimuli are not responded to immediately with physical action. They are responded to as symbols, signs, or portents; they are taken as symptoms of th

ince man is moved by more than one impulse at a time, reflection traces the consequences of each, and determines action on the basis of the relative satisfactions it can prophesy after careful inquiry into the situation. To reflect i

ruitful than those of animals precisely because human beings can check and modify instinctive responses in the light of consequences which they can foresee. These foreseen consequences are, of course, derived from previous experience; that is, they are "remembered." But reflection short-circuits the process. The more deliberate and reflective the process of learning, the more the individual notes the connections between the things he does and the results he gets, the fewer repetitions will he need in order effectively to modify his instinctive behavior into useful habits. He will anticipate results; he will experience them in imagination. He will not need to

t learner so much more quickly acquire effective new habits than the one who is mechanically drilled, leads also to a continuous criticism of habits, and their discontinuance when they are no longer adequat

n the light of the more desirable consequences they will bring. Habits come to be regarded not as final or as good in themselves, but as methods of accomplishing good. If

hen we act thoughtfully and intelligently, we are doing things not because we have done them that way in the past, or because it is

ation already used, the student may upon reflection study rather than go out. But the roots of his studying will also lie back in the instincts and habits which are, for better or for worse, his only equipment for action. They will lie back in the tendencies to be curious, to gain the praise of other people and to be a leader among them, in the habits of knowing work thoroughly, of studying in the evening, of maintaining a scholarship average to which he has been accustomed. Reflection may weigh the relative persuasions of various impulses;

papers in order, and persisting at work amid distractions. But the bad habits and the good are already fixed in our nervous system, and in physiology also possession is nine tenths of the law. We may intend to change, but by taking thought alone we cannot add a cubit to our stature. Reflection can do no more than point the way we should go.

to us. If we are by training committed to capital punishment, we will be concerned, if we think about it at all, with means and methods; we will think about the relative merits of hanging or electrocution; the ultimate justification or desirability of capital punishment will not be a problem or issue for us at all. Thus, it may be said in a sense that our thinking is determined by what we do not think about as much as by what we do think about. What we take for granted limits the field within which we will inquire or reflect at all. But what we take for granted is, on the whole, settled by our habitual reactions. And the more settled habitual convictions we have, the narrower becomes the field within which reflect

ot get any bread, the one problem that occurred to her was why they didn't eat cake. From the habits and conditions of life to which s

nking is rare precisely because habits do have such a compulsive power in determining the possibilities of action that suggest themselves to us. The man who moves in a rut of habitual reactions will "never think" of possibilities that "stare in the face" a less habit-ridden thinker. Inventiveness, originality, creative intelligence, whatever one chooses to cal

tally with the consequences which genuinely follow from it. But there is too often a sad discrepancy between the consequences as they are foreseen by the individual concerned and the genuine consequences that could be foreseen by any disinterested observer. The discrepancy between the genuine and the imagined consequences of given ideas or suggestions is caused more than anything else by the hopes, fears, aversions, and preferences which, by nature or training, are controlling in a man's behavior. Facts are weighed differently according as one

From Francis Bacon down, there have been various attempts to classify these factors in the distortion of the reflective process. In con

tant and terrible than a gifted youngster deprived of education through poverty. Instinctively we shrink back from the sight of blood, but instinct is no safe clue in helping us to distinguish between the poisons and the panaceas among the brightly colored bottles of chemicals ranged along a shelf. The whole technique of scientific method as opposed to the shrewd but unreliable guesses of common sense is one of

inst advice to live consciously, to be in control of ourselves, to know what we are about, comes the call "Back to Nature." A life of reflection appears chilling and arbitrary. Because reflection so often reveals that impulses must be checked if disaster is not to result, it has c

t 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 c

nced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external ac

Dewey: How We

e must do such and such things. Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our o

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

performance of any act that once required attention and discrimination, and has later become habitual. We do not think how to walk, eat, and spell familiar words, how to find our way about familiar streets or even in familiar dark rooms. We do think about where we shall spend our evenings or our summer, which courses we shall choose at college, which profession we shall enter. Where we are uneasy, drawn by competing impulses, we consider alternatives, measure consequences, and choose our course of action i

return of the seasons, the movements of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals born with a marked and sometimes a passionate desire to observe Nature and to generalize their observations. They have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of form

ons were drawn from them. The control of the conditions and methods of observation constitute what is known as induction in science. To this phase of the reflective process belong all the instruments for precise observation which charac

recise bearings, constitute that part of the process of reasoning known as deduction. The final verification is again inducti

ed in detail in the chapter on "

of magic, of malicious demons and capricious gods, was trying to make sense out of the meaningless medley in which he seemed to find himself. Through science, modern man is likewise trying to make sense out of his world. The more apparently disconnected and incongruous facts that can be brought within the compass of simple and perfectly regular law, the less threatening or capricious seems the world in which we live. Where everything that

n of music, poetry, and the plastic arts. From the sciences, likewise, we derive the satisfaction of symmetry on a magnificent scale. There is beauty as of a great symphony in the sweep and movement of the solar system. There is a quiet and infinite splendor about the changeless and comparatively simple structure which physics

n good. The whole of modern industry with its phenomenal control of natural powers and resources is testimony to the use which man has found for the facts and laws which he would never have found out save for the curiosity which was his endowment and the inquiry which he made his habit. "Knowledge is power," said Francis Bacon, and the three hundred years of science that have made possible the whole modern world of electric transportation, air travel between two continents, and instantaneous communication between remote parts of the world

cisely because they were practical, because they did help the human creature to maintain his equilibrium in a half-friendly, half-hostile environment. Man acquires also, as already has been pointed out, habits that are useful to him, that bring him

begins, for example, as a practical art, but the skilled potter cannot help spending a little excess vitality and habitual skill in adding a quite unnecessarily graceful curve, a gratuitous decoration to the utilitarian vessel he is making. In the words of Santayana, "What had to be done wa

ntayana: Reason

er human habits, as a thing of use. But the charming and delightful expression of feelings and ideas came to be cherished in themselves, so that what was first an accident in man's life, may become a deliberate practice. When this creation of beautif

f beauty man is not performing actions because he must, under the brutal compulsion of keeping alive. He is acting simply because action is delightful both in the proces

which their houses are things of beauty rather than merely places in which to live. Their lives are enriched by living in a society where the thoughts and emotions which they communicate to one another and which they mus