s
requirements and possibilities checked up by the actual facts and the
goal. The suggestions that the pole was simply to carry a flag, was an
ornament, was the terminal of a wireless telegraph, were examined and
rejected. The final one, that the pole was to point out the direction in
which the boat was moving, upon analysis seemed most probable and was
accepted. The one characteristic of the pole, that it points direction,
and its position, need to be accepted as the essential facts in the
situation, for the particular problem. Without control of the process,
without the two steps of analysis and abstraction, no conclusion could
have been reached.

Analysis and abstraction may be facilitated in three ways. First, by
attentive piecemeal examination. The total situation is examined,
element by element, attentively, until the element needed is reached or
approximated. This method of procedure helps to emphasize minor bonds of
association which the element possesses in the learner's experience but
which he needs to have brought to his attention. It can only be used
when the element is known to some degree. It is the method to use when
elements are known in a hazy, incomplete, or indefinite way and need
clearing up. Second, by varying the concomitant. An element associated
with many situations, which vary in other respects, comes to be felt and
recognized as independent. This is the method to use when a new element
in a complex is to be taught. Third, by contrast. A new element is
brought into consciousness more quickly if it is set side by side with
its opposite. Of course, this is only true provided the opposite has
already been learned. To present opposites, both of which are new or
only partially learned, confuses the analysis instead of facilitating
it.

Reasoning, as the highest type of thinking, includes all that thinking
in general does, and adds some particular requirement which
differentiates it from the simpler forms. Further discussion of it,
then, should make clearer the essential in thinking as a process, as
well as make clear its most difficult form. Reasoning is defined by
Miller as "controlled thinking,--thinking organized and systematized
according to laws and principles and carried on by use of superior
technique."[9] Reasoning, then, is the kind of thinking that deals
directly with laws and principles. Much thinking may be carried on
without any overt, definite use of laws and principles, as in
constr