bout the anticipated result,
and thereby testing the hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of
steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience
from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an
experience. Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to
be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can never
take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect
accuracy all the consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is
so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a
right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and
error forms of action.

Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first
noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active
doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning
of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of
connections between what is done and its consequences. It notes not only
that they are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The stimulus
to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some
act, performed or to be performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This
implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us,
incomplete and hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means
a proposed or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the
hypothesis developed--an operation called reasoning. Then the suggested
solution--the idea or theory--has to be tested by acting upon it. If it
brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the
world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise it is modified, and another
trial made. Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a
problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational
elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental
testing. While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value
of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live not in a
settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our
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