Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/54

 36 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

the concepts &quot; bird &quot; and &quot; colour,&quot; and many others, and will be weaving them into a more or less complex system of relations with one another, because they all lie in closely adjacent fields of experience, and in his responses to stimuli coming from those fields he has almost inevitably connected them together. In the meantime he will be building up in somewhat widely separated fields of experience other sys tems of ideas. Before long these widely separated fields will come to be more or less closely correlated in his mind at first those in which he is most active and which do not lie too far apart, and gradually those more remote.

2. Reflective and unreflective organization. In the be ginning of the construction of one s system of ideas the process is unreflective. 1 It begins, indeed, in the instinctive and largely random reactions of the baby. It is continued in the more or less accidental generalizations and formula tions of the growing child, who does not realize that he is forming concepts of the various kinds of objects that come within the range of his experience and that he is relating them to one another in a mental system. He is intent only upon the satisfaction of his active impulses. With develop ing life his practical ends become more conscious, more definite ; but the experiences controlled by these practical ends continue to be the bases of his correlations of ideas. But, while this is true, his rapidly multiplying relations and expanding activities are compelling him to deal with more and more complex situations, to set for himself more distant ends which can be reached only by a longer and more com plicated series of means. Again and again he finds that the organization of ideas as it has taken shape in his mind is not adequate to guide him in these new and more difficult situations. He is forced by his mental embarrassments, by his mistakes and failures, to revise and in some measure to reconstruct his concepts and the systems into which they have been linked. This process involves reflection; though at first, of course, it is very partial and uncritical. But it is

1 See Miller s &quot; Psychology of Thinking,&quot; pp. 206-223.

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