Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 263 
ideas of acts and yet perform no one of them, save those in 
the case of which he has learned to do the thing when he 
thinks of doing it. Again, how can the mere addition of 
the idea of a future date to the idea of an act so utterly 
deprive it of present potency. 
In view of all these facts it seems probable that ideas of 
responses act in connection just as do any other situations, 
and that the phenomena of suggestion and ideo-motor 
action really mean that any idea will, except for competing 
ideas, produce the response, not that zs like it, but that has 
gone with it, or with some idea like it. 
| Rational connections are, in their causation, like any 
others, the difference being in what is connected. \ 
It remains to ask whether situation and response are 
bound together in the case of reasoning by any other forces 
than the forces of repetition, energy and satisfaction? Do 
the laws of inferential thinking transcend the laws of exer- 
cise and effect? Or does the mind, even in these novel and 
constructive responses, do only what it is forced to do by 
original nature or has done without discomfort ? 
To defend the second alternative involves) the reduction 
of the processes of abstraction, association by similarity and 
selective thinking to mere secondary consequences of the 
laws of exercise and effect. This I shall try to do 
The gist of the fact of abstraction is that response may be 
made to some elements or aspects of a situation which have 
never been experienced in isolation, and may be made to the 
elerr ‘nt in question regardless of the gross total situation in 
wich it inheres. 1A baby thus learns to respond to its 
diother’s face regardless of what total visual field it is a part 
of. A child thus learns to respond by picking out any red 
object, regardless of whether the redness be in an apple, a 
