we will be
concerned, if we think about it at all, with means and methods;
we will think about the relative merits of hanging or
electrocution; the ultimate justification or desirability of capital
punishment will not be a problem or issue for us at all.
Thus, it may be said in a sense that our thinking is determined
by what we do not think about as much as by what we do
think about. What we take for granted limits the field within
which we will inquire or reflect at all. But what we take for
granted is, on the whole, settled by our habitual reactions.
And the more settled habitual convictions we have, the narrower
becomes the field within which reflection takes place.
Force of habit may leave us blind to many situations genuinely
demanding solution. Originality in thinking consists,
in part at least, in an ability to see a problem where others,
through routine, see none. Apples have fallen on the heads
of others than Newton, but a habit-ridden rustic will not be
stirred by the falling of an apple to reflection on the problem
of falling bodies. The countryman may live all his life serenely
oblivious to a thousand problems that would pique
the curiosity and reflection of a botanist or geologist. A man
may go on for years accepting income on investments earned
in very dubious ways without ever pausing to reflect on the
sources or the justification of his wealth.[1]

[Footnote 1: According to the traditional anecdote, when Marie Antoinette
was told that the people were clamoring because they could not get any
bread, the one problem that occurred to her was why they didn't eat
cake. From the habits and conditions of life to which she was accustomed,
there had never arisen a problem as to how to get food at all; it was
merely a problem of what kind of food to eat.]

Instincts and habits, furthermore, limit the field of possible
courses of action that suggest themselves. We come, through
habit, to be alive only to certain possibilities to the practical
exclusion of all others. Thinking becomes fruitful and suggestive
when it is freed from the limited number of suggestions
that occur through force of habit. But original thinking is
rare precisely because habits do have such a compulsive
power in determining the possibilities of action that suggest
themselves to us. The man who moves in a rut of habitual
reactions will "never think" of possibilities that "stare in the
face" a less habit-ridden thinker. Inventiveness, origi