al
processes.

EXERCISES

Exercise I. "Watch a small dot so far away that it can just be seen.
Can you see it all the time? How many times a minute does it come and
go?" Make what inference you can from this regarding the fluctuation of
attention during study.

Exercise 2. What concrete steps will you take in order to accommodate
your study to the fluctuations of attention?

Exercise 3. The next time you have a lapse of attention during study,
retrace your steps of thought, write down the ideas from the last one
in your mind to the one which started the digression. Represent the
digression graphically if you can.

Exercise 4. Make a list of the things that most persistently distract
your attention during study. What specific steps will you take to
eliminate them; to ignore the unavoidable ones?

CHAPTER IX

HOW WE REASON

If you were asked to describe the most embarrassing of your class-room
experiences, you would probably cite the occasions when the instructor
asks you a series of questions demanding close reasoning. As he pins
you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid
conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. Either you
find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in
contradictions. In short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as
though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. And when
the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation
which you thought you had been perfectly prepared for, you complain
that "if the instructor had followed the book," or "if he had asked
straight questions," you would have answered every one perfectly,
having memorized the lesson "word for word."

This complaint, so often voiced by students, reveals the fundamental
characteristic which distinguishes the mental operation of reasoning
from the others we have studied. In reasoning we face a new kind of
situation presenting difficulties not encountered in the simpler
processes of sensation, memory, and imagery, and when we attempt to
substitute these simple processes for reasoning, we fail miserably, for
the two kinds of processes are essentially different, and cannot be
substituted one for the other.

Broadly speaking, the mental activities of study may be divided into
two groups, which, for want of better names, we shall call processes of
acquisition and processes of construction. The mental attitude of the
first is that of acqui