erm _James_ has brought into common usage to
illustrate the fact, already stressed, that thinking, as we know it, is
never static, is never one thing, one percept, one concept, one
judgment; but is a lot of these all together, just beginning to be or
just beginning to change into something else. We never know a concept,
for instance, except as it is a part of our entire consciousness,
related to all the rest; just as we do not know the drop of water in the
brook as it flows with the stream. We can take up one on our
finger-tips, however, and separate it from all the rest. But analyzed in
the laboratory, this drop will contain all the elements that a pint or
gallon or a barrel of the same water contains. The drop is what it is
because the stream has a certain composition. We only have a brook as
drops of rain combine to make it, but we also have only the drops as we
separate them from the steam.

_Imagination_ is the combining by the mind, in a new way, things already
known.

This may be either into fantastic groupings divorced from reality, or
into new, possible, rational groupings not yet experienced. So
imagination is of two kinds, the fantastic and the constructive.
Fantastic imagination, or fantasy, gives us gnomes, fairies, giants, and
flying horses, and all the delights of fairy tales. Constructive
imagination is the basis for invention, for literature, and the arts and
sciences.

The word _thinking_, defined early in this chapter, is broadly used to
denote the sum of all the intellectual faculties. Thinking is really the
stream of thought.

CHAPTER VI

THE NORMAL MIND (Continued)

INSTINCT

We have found that the mind's chief end is action, of itself, or of its
body. But what are its incentives to action?

We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional life, living
in an affective, or feeling environment, leading a pleasure-pain
existence, from the first. He acts as desire indicates. But from the
very moment of his birth he performs actions with which he cannot as yet
have a sense-memory connection, because he is doing them for the first
time. How can he know how to respond to stimuli from the very beginning?

No other possible explanation offers itself than that he is born with
certain tendencies to definite action. These we call instincts--man's
provision to keep him going, as it were, till reason develops. Instincts
are handed down from all the past. Definite tendencies, they a