The laws of readiness, exercise, and effect govern thinking just as they do all other mental processes.  Thinking is not independent of habit; it is not a mysterious force other than association which deals with novel data.  Thinking is merely an exhibition of the laws of habit under certain definite situations.  At first sight this seems to be impossible, because, as has been emphasized throughout this chapter, thinking takes place when no satisfactory response is at hand and when nothing is offered by past experience which is adequate.  As a result of the thinking, responses are reached which never before have occurred as a result of that situation.  Just the same they are reached only because of the operation of the laws of habit.  It must be borne in mind that the laws of association do not work in such a way that only gross total situations are bound to total responses.  In man particularly, situations are being continually broken up into elements, and those elements connected with responses.  Responses are being continually disintegrated, and elements, instead of the whole response, being bound to situations.  Analysis is continually taking place merely as a result of the working of these laws.  If the nervous mechanism of man were not of this hair-trigger variety, if elements did not emerge from a total complex as a result of bonds formed, of readiness of certain tracts, no willing, no attention on the part of the thinker, would ever bring about analysis.  This is made very vivid when one is met by a problem he cannot solve.  If the situation does not break up, if the right element does not emerge, if the right cue is not given, he is helpless.  All he can do is to hold fast to his problem and wait.  As the associations are offered, he can select and reject, but that is all.  The marvelous power of the genius, the inventor, the reasoner in all fields, is merely an exhibition of the laws of association working with extremely subtle elements.  It seems to transcend all experience because these elements and the bonds which experience has formed cannot be observed.  A child fails in his thinking often because he uses his past experience and responds by analogy—­we note that fact and criticize him for it.  But he succeeds for just the same reason and by the use of just the same laws.  James long ago showed conclusively that association by similarity, which is one of the prominent types used in reasoning, was only the law of habit working with elements of novel data.

The fact that thinking is determined by its aim rather than by its antecedents has also been given a mysterious place as apart from association.  The thinker who chose the right associate, the one that led him towards his goal rather than some other, was called sagacious.  But, after all, this being governed by an aim is nothing more than the operation of the law of readiness among intellectual bonds.  One associate is chosen and another rejected because one is more satisfying than another.  Certain bonds