The causes of error in appraising the consequences of any given course of action are partly individual and partly social in character. From Francis Bacon down, there have been various attempts to classify these factors in the distortion of the reflective process. In connection with the particular human traits, especially such as fear and gregariousness, we shall have occasion to examine a few of these.
It will suffice to point out here that the aim of reflective thinking is to discover the genuine consequences of things, and to eliminate and discount those prejudices and preferences, bred of early education and training, which might impair our discovery of those consequences. To the untrained, those things look most significant which stir their impulses most strikingly. The beggar's sores seem much more important and terrible than a gifted youngster deprived of education through poverty. Instinctively we shrink back from the sight of blood, but instinct is no safe clue in helping us to distinguish between the poisons and the panaceas among the brightly colored bottles of chemicals ranged along a shelf. The whole technique of scientific method as opposed to the shrewd but unreliable guesses of common sense is one of freeing us from the compulsions of random habitual impulses. It substitutes for caprice the measuring of consequences, the detailed knowing of what we are about. That impartial judgment has its difficulties is clear from the simple fact alone that human beings start by being a bundle of instincts and soon grow into a bundle of habits. To the extent to which they can control these they are masters of themselves.
The value of reflection for life. To many people there is something terrifying about the idea of controlling life by reason. Life (they point out correctly) is a vital process of instincts which appear before thinking, and which are often more powerful than reasoned judgments. Against advice to live consciously, to be in control of ourselves, to know what we are about, comes the call "Back to Nature." A life of reflection appears chilling and arbitrary. Because reflection so often reveals that impulses must be checked if disaster is not to result, it has come to be associated with a metallic and Stoic repression. To many a persuasive impulse we must, after reflection, say, "No." Because of this a certain school of philosophers, poets, and radicals urges us to trust nature, to follow our impulses, which, being natural, must be right.
All of these rebels against reason make the mistake of supposing that the aim of reflective thinking is to quell instincts, which, with the best will in the world, it cannot succeed in doing. Instincts are present and powerful. In themselves they are neither worth encouraging, nor ought they to be repressed. The satisfaction of native desires is what we want. The importance of reflective thinking is precisely that it helps us to secure those satisfactions. To surrender to every random impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares. If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the consequences we can foresee. To thus guide and control action makes us genuinely free.
If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, they are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: How We Think, p. 67.]
Instincts and habits are fixed responses; being placed in such and such circumstances we must do such and such things. Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our own thinking are we masters of our environment rather than mechanically controlled by it.
The social importance of reflective behavior. Reflection in the life of the individual insures that he will not become the slave of his own habits. He will regard habits as methods to be followed when they produce good results, to be discarded or modified when they do not. But if habit in the life of the individual needs control lest it become dangerously controlling, it needs it more conspicuously still in the life of the group. Unless the individuals that compose a society are alert and conscious of the bearings of their actions, they will be completely and mechanically controlled by the customs to which they have been exposed in the early periods of their lives. What an individual regards as right or wrong, what he will cherish or champion in industry, government, and art, depends in large measure on his early education and training and on the opinions and beliefs of other people with whom he repeatedly comes in contact. A society may be democratic in its political form and still autocratic in fact if the majority of its citizens are merely machines which can be set off 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 observations. They have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of form and structure have certain identical ways of life, that some substances are malleable and others not, that dew appears at certain times in the day on certain objects and not on others. They have generalized from these; and we now call such generalizations law. These generalizations when gathered into a system constitute a science.