iscussed in detail
in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method."]

On the one hand, the gregarious instinct, the desire for rest,
native curiosity, and an acquired interest in drama may
prompt him strongly to go to the theater. On the other
hand, the habits of industry, ambition, self-assertion, and
studying in the evening urge him to stay at home and study.
The first course of action may, for the moment, be immediately
attractive and stimulating. But instead of responding
to either immediately, the student rehearses dramatically the
possibilities associated with each. On the one hand are the
immediate satisfactions of rest, amusement, and companionship.
But as further consequences of the impulse to go out
to the theater are seen--or, rather, are foreseen--failure in
the examination, the loss of a scholarship, pain to one's family
or friends, and chagrin at the frustration of one's deepest and
most permanent ideals. The second course of action, to
stay at home and study, though it is seen to have connected
with it certain immediate privations, is foreseen to involve
the further consequences of passing the examination, keeping
one's scholarship, and maintaining certain personal or intellectual
standards one has set one's self. Even if the student
decides to follow the first course of action to which an immediate
impulse has prompted him, his act is different in quality
from what it would have been if he had not reflected at all.
The student goes out fully aware of the consequences of what
he is doing; he goes _for_ the immediate pleasure and _in spite
of_ the possible failure in the examination. The very heart
of reflective behavior is thus seen to lie in the fact that present
stimuli are reacted to, not for what they are as immediate
stimuli, but for what they signify, portend, imply, in the way
of consequences or results. And a response made upon reflection
is made on the basis of these imaginatively realized consequences.
We connect what we do with the results that
flow from the doing, and control our action in the light of that
prophetically realized connection.

The process is obviously not always so simple as that described
in the above illustration. In the first place, more
than two courses of action may suggest themselves. And the
consequences of any one of them may be far more complex
and far more obscure than any suggested in the above. For
an individual to be able to decide a problem on the basis of