nd to
act reflectively is the only escape from random acts prompted
by instinct and routine ones prompted by habit.

To act reflectively is to delay response to an instinctive or
habitual stimulus until the various possibilities of action and
the results associated with each have been considered. An
action performed instinctively or habitually is automatic; it
is performed not on the basis of what will be the result, but
simply as an immediate response to a present stimulus. But
an act (or a series of acts) reflectively performed is performed
in the light of the results that are prophetically associated
with them. In the case of instinct and habit, the individual
almost literally does not know what he is about. In reflective
activity he does know, and the more thorough the reflective
process, the more thorough and precise is his knowledge. He
performs actions _because_ they will achieve certain results, and
he is conscious of that causal connection, both before the
action is performed when he perceives the results imaginatively,
and after it is performed when he sees them in fact.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF REFLECTION. Reflection, it must be
noted in the first place, is not a thing, but a process. It is a
process whereby human beings adjust themselves to a continuously
changing environment. Our instincts and habits
suffice to adapt us to that large number of recurrent similar
situations of which our experience in no small measure exists.
In such cases the habitual response will bring the usual satisfaction.
Walking, dressing, getting to familiar places, finding
the electric button in well-known rooms, opening often-opened
combinations--these operations are all adequately
accomplished by the fixed mechanisms of habit. But we
meet as frequently with novel situations where the accustomed
or instinctive reactions will not bring the desired satisfaction.
One response or a number of responses will not
adjust the individual satisfactorily to external conditions; or
there may be a conflict between a number of impulses all
clamoring for satisfaction at once. Reflection thus begins
either in a maladjustment between the individual and his
environment or in a conflict of impulses within the same
person.

Where such a maladjustment occurs, the uneasiness, discomfort,
and frustration of action may be removed in one of
two ways. Adjustment may be achieved, as we have already
seen, through physical trial and error, through a hit