thinking is not always used to bring about a satisfactory adjustment.  Following an instinctive prompting when confronted by a new situation; blindly following another’s lead; using the trial and error method of response; reacting to the situation as to the old situation most like it; or response by analogy:  all are methods of dealing with new situations which often result in correct adjustments, and yet none of which need involve thinking.  This does not mean that these methods, save the first mentioned, may not be accompanied by thinking; but that each of them may be used without the conscious adjustment of means to end demanded by thinking.  That these methods, and not thinking, are the ones most often used, even by adults, in dealing with problems, cannot be denied.  They offer an easy means of escape from the more troublesome method of thinking.  It is so much easier to accept what some one else says, so much easier to agree with a book’s answer to a question than to think it out for oneself.  Following the first suggestion offered, just going at things in a hit-or-miss fashion, uncritical response by analogy, saves much time and energy apparently, and therefore these methods are adopted and followed by the majority of people in most of the circumstances of life.  It is human nature to think only when no other method of mental activity brings the desired response.  We think only when we must.

Not only is it true that problems are often solved correctly by other methods than that of thinking, but on the other hand much thinking may take place and yet the result be an incorrect conclusion, or perhaps no solution at all be reached.  Think of the years of work men have devoted to a single problem, and yet perhaps at the end of that time, because of a wrong premise or some incorrect data, have arrived at a result that later years have proved to have been utterly false.  Think of the investigations being carried on now in medicine, in science, in invention, which because of the lack of knowledge are still incomplete, and yet in each case thinking of the most technical and rigorous type has been used.  Thinking cannot be considered in terms of the result.  Correct results may be obtained, even in problematic situations, with no thinking, and on the other hand much thinking may be done and yet the results reached be entirely unsatisfactory.  Thinking is a process involving a certain definite procedure.  It is the organisation of all mental states toward a certain definite end, but is not any one mental state.  In certain types of situations this procedure is the one most certain of reaching correct conclusions, in some situations it is the only possible one, but the conclusion is not the thinking and its correctness does not differentiate the process from others.