ese words or labels become
the vehicles of thought, and the outcome of the thinking depends on the
validity of the organization of our experience.

SUMMARY. Thinking is the passing of ideas in the mind; its basis is
in the association of memory ideas. The basis of association is in
original experience, ideas becoming bound together in memory as
originally experienced. The factors of association are primacy,
recency, frequency, intensity, and mental set or attitude. Reasoning
is thinking to a purpose. We can be trained in reasoning by being
taught to get vivid experience in the first place and in organizing
this experience in helpful ways, having in mind future use.

CLASS EXERCISES

1. A series of experiments should be performed to make clear to the
students that the basis of the association of ideas is in _experience_
and not in the nature of the ideas themselves.

(a) Let the students, starting with the same word, write down all the
ideas that come to mind in one minute. The teacher should give the
initial idea, as sky, hate, music, clock, table, or wind. The first ten
ideas coming to each student might be written on the blackboard for
study and comparison. Are any series alike? Is the tenth idea in one
series the same as that in any other?

(b) For a study of the various factors of association, perform the
following experiment: Let the teacher prepare a list of fifty
words--nouns and adjectives, such as wood, murder, goodness, bad, death,
water, love, angel. Read the words to the class and let each student
write down the first idea that comes to mind in each case. After the
list is finished, let each student try to find out what the determining
factor was in each case, whether primacy, frequency, recency, vividness,
or mental set. When the study is completed, the student's paper should
contain three columns, the first column showing the stimulus words, the
second showing the response words, the third showing the determining
factors. The first column should be dictated and copied after the
response words have been written.

(c) Study the data in (a) and (b), noting the variety of ideas
that come to different students for the same stimulus word. It will be
seen that they come from a great variety of experiences and from all
parts of one's life from childhood to the present, showing that all our
experiences are bound together and that we can go from one point to any
other, directly or indirectly