The problem was to find out the use of the flag pole.  No adequate explanation came as the problem presented itself; it therefore caused a state of uncertainty, of suspended judgment, and a process of thinking in order to get an answer.  Each suggestion that came was analyzed, its 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 constructive imagination or in apperception, but, if this is so, it seems better to call the thinking by one of the other names.  Of course this classification is somewhat arbitrary, but there can be no question that types of thinking do differ.  As has already