hing which costs so much, which is grown in
warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odor and
refreshing taste, etc.

The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning;
the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a
blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant
need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side
purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble
upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am
startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not--more likely, if
I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that
is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has
a mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend,
propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously,
unintelligently.

In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind.
There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to
recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us
have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were
formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess
us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become
aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the
result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time
he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing
would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of
recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end
in view--as having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was
about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said
to be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea
of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is
to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive
scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of
the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the
same ideas about things which ot