to
respond in certain determinate ways to customary stimuli of
names, leaders, and party slogans. A society becomes genuinely
democratic, precisely to the extent to which there is
on the part of its citizens participation in the important decisions
affecting all their lives. But the participation will only
be a formality if votes are decided and opinions formed on the
basis of habit alone.

REFLECTION REMOVED FROM IMMEDIATE APPLICATION--SCIENCE.
Thus far thinking has been discussed in its more practical
aspects. And thinking is in its origins a very practical matter.
Literally, most people think when they have to, and only
when they have to. Given a problem, a difficulty, a
maladjustment between the individual and his environment,
thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction,
thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently
practiced. This is illustrated in the performance of
any act that once required attention and discrimination, and
has later become habitual. We do not think how to walk,
eat, and spell familiar words, how to find our way about
familiar streets or even in familiar dark rooms. We _do_ think
about where we shall spend our evenings or our summer,
which courses we shall choose at college, which profession
we shall enter. Where we are uneasy, drawn by competing
impulses, we consider alternatives, measure consequences,
and choose our course of action in the light of the results we
can forecast. But while a large proportion of reflective behavior
is thus practical in its origins and its results, it also
occurs not infrequently where there is no immediate problem
to be solved. Not all of men's energies are concerned in
purely practical concerns. And part of man's superfluous
vitality is expended in disinterested and curious inquiry
into problems whose solutions afford no immediate practical
benefits, but in the mere solving of which man finds
satisfaction.

From the dawn of history, when some man a little more
curious than his fellows, a little less absorbed in the hunting,
the food-getting, and the fighting which were in those early
days man's chief imperative business, first began to observe
the mysterious recurrences in the world about him, the rising
and setting of the sun, the return of the seasons, the movements
of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals
born with a marked and sometimes a passionate desire to
observe Nature and to generalize their obs