ur lessons. Does
the material learned in this way stay with you? Do you _understand_ it
and find yourself able to _use_ it as well as stuff learned during a
longer interval and with more time for associations to form?

CHAPTER XII

THINKING

No word is more constantly on our lips than the word _think_. A hundred
times a day we tell what we think about this thing or that. Any
exceptional power of thought classes us among the efficient of our
generation. It is in their ability to think that men stand preeminently
above the animals.

1. DIFFERENT TYPES OF THINKING

The term _think_, or _thinking_, is employed in so many different senses
that it will be well first of all to come to an understanding as to its
various uses. Four different types of thinking which we shall note
are:[5] (1) _chance_, or idle, thinking; (2) thinking in the form of
_uncritical belief_; (3) _assimilative_ thinking; and (4) _deliberative_
thinking.

CHANCE OR IDLE THINKING.--Our thinking is of the chance or idle kind
when we think to no conscious end. No particular problem is up for
solution, and the stream of thought drifts along in idleness. In such
thinking, immediate interest, some idle fancy, the impulse of the
moment, or the suggestions from our environment determine the train of
associations and give direction to our thought. In a sense, we surrender
our mental bark to the winds of circumstance to drive it whithersoever
they will without let or hindrance from us. Since no results are sought
from our thinking, none are obtained. The best of us spend more time in
these idle trains of thought than we would like to admit, while inferior
and untrained minds seldom rise above this barren thought level. Not
infrequently even when we are studying a lesson which demands our best
thought power we find that an idle chain of associations has supplanted
the more rigid type of thinking and appropriated the field.

UNCRITICAL BELIEF.--We often say that we think a certain thing is true
or false when we have, as a matter of fact, done little or no thinking
about it. We only _believe_, or uncritically accept, the common point of
view as to the truth or untruth of the matter concerned. The ancients
believed that the earth was flat, and the savages that eclipses were
caused by animals eating up the moon. Not a few people today believe
that potatoes and other vegetables should be planted at a certain phase
of the moon, that sickness is a visita