iii mind can be understood in the concrete only as a system of beliefs, desires and purposes which are formed in the interaction of biological aptitudes with a social environment.

p.25 All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self... They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities.

p.30 formation of ideas as well as their execution depends upon habit.

p.37 The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some end, or result... In actuality each habit operates all the time of waking life; though like a member of a crew taking his turn at the wheel, its operation becomes the dominantly characteristic trait of an act only occasionally or rarely.

p.39 At any given time, certain habits must be taken for granted as a matter of course.

p.42 The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response... Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions... It means will.

p.44 other things being equal, the right disposition will produce the right deed. For a disposition means a tendency to act, a potential energy needing only opportunity to become kinetic and overt.

p.48 We need to study consequences more thoroughly and keep track of them more continuously before we shall be in a position where we can pass with reasonable assurance upon the good and evil in either disposition or results... we are forcing the pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of disposition and outcome.

p.48-49 We cannot get beyond tendencies, and must perforce content ourselves with judgments of tendency... The word "tendency" is an attempt to combine two facts, one that habits have a certain causal efficacy, the other that their outworking in any particular case is subject to contingencies, to circumstances which are unforeseeable and which carry an act one side of its usual effect. In cases of doubt, there is no recourse save to stick to "tendency," that is, to the probable effect of a habit in the long run, or as we say upon the whole.

p.50-51 An honestly modest theory will stick to the probabilities of tendency, and not import mathematics into morals. It will be alive and sensitive to consequences as they actually present themselves, because it knows that they give the only instruction we can procure as to the meaning of habits and dispositions. But it will never assume that a moral judgment which reaches certainty is possible. We have just to do the best we can with habits, the forces most under our control; and we shall have our hands more than full in spelling out their general tendencies without attempting an exact judgment upon each deed. For every habit incorporates within itself some part of the objective environment, and no habit and no amount of habits can incorporate the entire environment within itself or themselves. There will always be disparity between them and the results actually attained. Hence the work of intelligence in observing consequences and in revising and readjusting habits, even the best of good habits, can never be foregone. Consequences reveal unexpected potentialities in our habits whenever these habits are exercised in a different environment from that in which they were formed.

p.56 The essential point is that anticipation should at least guide as well as stimulate effort, that it should be a working hypothesis corrected and developed by events as action proceeds.

p.56 The scientific revolution which began in the seventeenth century... began with recognition that every natural object is in truth an event continuous in space and time with other events; and is to be known only by experimental inquiries which will exhibit a multitude of complicated, obscure and minute relationships.

p.69 thinking cannot itself escape the influence of habit, any more than anything else human.

p.70 all habit involves mechanization. Habit is impossible without setting up a mechanism of action, physiologically engrained, which operates "spontaneously," automatically, whenever the cue is given.

p.70 Even in dealing with inanimate machines we rank that invention higher which adapts its movements to varying conditions.

p.81 The only question having sense which can be asked is how we are going to use and be used by these things, not whether we are going to use them.

p.120 An element in an act viewed as a tendency to produce such and such consequences is a motive.

p.135 The acts that spring from life also in the main conserve life. Such is the undoubted fact.

p.177 habit does not, of itself, know, for it does not of itself stop to think, observe or remember... We may, indeed, be said to know how by means of our habits.

p.178 it is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconscious it operates. Only a hitch in its workings occasions emotion and provokes thought.

p.178-179 in every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism and its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored... Life is interruptions and recoveries... at these moments of a shifting in activity conscious feeling and thought arise and are accentuated.

p.180 Without habit there is only irritation and confused hesitation. With habit there is a machine-like repetition, a duplicating recurrence of old acts. With conflict of habits and release of impulse there is conscious search.

p.182 The scientific man and the philosopher like the carpenter, the physician and politician know with their habits not with their "consciousness."

p.190 Our first problem is then to investigate... the nature of deliberation. We begin with a summary assertion that deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action... Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon... The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable.

p.190 Each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head.

p.191 As has been remarked, the object is that which objects.

p.192 What then is choice? Simply hitting in imagination upon an object which furnishes an adequate stimulus to the recovery of overt action. Choice is made as soon as some habit, or some combination of elements of habits and impulse, finds a way fully open. Then energy is released. The mind is made up, composed, unified. As long as deliberation pictures shoals or rocks or troublesome gales as marking the route of a contemplated voyage, deliberation goes on. But when the various factors in action fit harmoniously together, when imagination finds no annoying hindrance, when there is a picture of open seas, filled sails and favoring winds, the voyage is definitely entered upon.

p.193 It is a great error to suppose that we have no preferences until there is a choice... The occasion of deliberation is an excess of preferences, not natural apathy or an absence of likings... Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indifference. It is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences.

p.193 All deliberation is a search for a way to act, not for a final terminus.

p.194 Nothing is more extraordinary than the delicacy, promptness and ingenuity with which deliberation is capable of making eliminations and recombinations in projecting the course of a possible activity. To every shade of imagined circumstance there is a vibrating response; and to every complex situation a sensitiveness as to its integrity, a feeling of whether it does justice to all facts, or overrides some to the advantage of others. Decision is reasonable when deliberation is so conducted. There may be error in the result, but it comes from lack of data not from ineptitude in handling them.

p.194-195 Choice is reasonable when it induces us to act reasonably; that is, with regard to the claims of each of the competing habits and impulses.

p.195 The cue of passion, he [William James] says in effect, is to keep imagination dwelling upon those objects which are congenial to it, which feed it, and which by feeding it intensify its force, until it crowds out all thought of other objects.

p.196 Rationality, once more, is not a force to evoke against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse desires.

p.196-197 The clew [JLJ - Dewey apparently uses the British variant of clue, perhaps nature is a better word] of impulse is, as we say, to start something. It is in a hurry. It rushes us off our feet. It leaves no time for examination, memory and foresight. But the clew of reason is, as the phrase also goes, to stop and think. Force, however, is required to stop the ongoing of a habit or impulse. This is supplied by another habit. The resulting period of delay, of suspended and postponed overt action, is the period in which activities that are refused direct outlet project imaginative counterparts. It signifies, in technical phrase, the mediation of impulse.

p.199 Deliberation has its beginning in troubled activity and its conclusion in choice of a course of action which straightens it out... The primary fact is that man is a being who responds in action to the stimuli of the environment. This fact is complicated in deliberation, but it certainly is not abolished. We continue to react to an object presented in imagination as we react to objects presented in observation.

p.200 reasoning puts before us objects which are not directly or sensibly present, so that we then may react directly to these objects, with aversion, attraction, indifference or attachment, precisely as we would to the same objects if they were physically present. In the end it results in a case of direct stimulus and response. In one case the stimulus is presented at once through sense; in the other case, it is indirectly reached through memory and constructive imagination.

p.205-206 the object of foresight of consequences is not to predict the future. It is to ascertain the meaning of present activities and to secure, so far as possible, a present activity with a unified meaning.

p.206-207 Hence the problem of deliberation is not to calculate future happenings but to appraise present proposed actions. We judge present desires and habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences. It is our business to watch the course of our action so as to see what is the significance, the import of our habits and dispositions. The future outcome is not certain. But neither is it certain what the present fire will do in the future. It may be unexpectedly fed or extinguished. But its tendency is a knowable matter, what it will do under certain circumstances. And so we know what is the tendency of malice, charity, conceit, patience. We know by observing their consequences, by recollecting what we have observed, by using that recollection in constructive imaginative forecasts of the future, by using the thought of future consequence to tell the quality of the act now proposed.

p.207 by constant watchfulness concerning the tendency of acts, by noting disparities between former judgments and actual outcomes, and tracing that part of the disparity that was due to deficiency and excess in disposition, we come to know the meaning of present acts, and to guide them in the light of that meaning.

p.207 The occasion of deliberation, that is of the attempt to find a stimulus to complete overt action in thought of some future object, is confusion and uncertainty in present activities.

p.208 continuing search and experimentation to discover the meaning of changing activity, keeps activity alive, growing in significance.

p.216-217 Deliberation is a work of discovery... It is an attempt to uncover the conflict in its full scope and bearing. What we want to find out is what difference each impulse and habit imports, to reveal qualitative incompatibilities by detecting the different courses to which they commit us, the different dispositions they form and foster, the different situations into which they plunge us.
 In short, the thing actually at stake in any serious deliberation is not a difference of quantity, but what kind of person one is to become, what sort of self is in the making, what kind of a world is making.

p.226 Having an end or aim is thus a characteristic of present activity. It is the means by which an activity becomes adapted when otherwise it would be blind and disorderly, or by which it gets meaning when otherwise it would be mechanical.

p.226 A mariner does not sail towards the stars, but by noting the stars he is aided in conducting his present activity of sailing... The harbor stands in his thought as a significant point at which his activity will need re-direction. Activity will not cease when the port is attained, but merely the present direction of activity.

p.231 Why is it not universally recognized that an end is a device of intelligence in guiding action, instrumental to freeing and harmonizing troubled and divided tendencies?

p.234 Roughly speaking, the course of forming aims is as follows. The beginning is with a wish, an emotional reaction against the present state of things and a hope for something different... It becomes an aim or end only when it is worked out in terms of concrete conditions available for its realization, that is in terms of "means."

p.240-241 all principles are empirical generalizations from the ways in which previous judgments of conduct have practically worked out. When this fact is apparent, these generalizations will be seen to be not fixed rules for deciding doubtful cases, but instrumentalities for their investigation, methods by which the net value of past experience is rendered available for present scrutiny of new perplexities. Then it will also follow that they are hypotheses to be tested and revised by their further working.

p.258 emotion without thought is unstable.

p.261 The action of deliberation, as we have seen, consists in selecting some foreseen consequence to serve as a stimulus to present action. It brings future possibilities into the present scene and thereby frees and expands present tendencies. But the selected consequence is set in an indefinite context of other consequences just as real as it is, and many of them much more certain in fact. The "ends" that are foreseen and utilized mark out a little island in an infinite sea. This limitation would be fatal were the proper function of ends anything else than to liberate and guide present action out of its perplexities and confusions. But this service constitutes the sole meaning of aims and purposes.

p.269 Until men have formed the habit of using intelligence fully as a guide to present action they will never find out how much control of future contingencies is possible.

p.283 Progress means increase of present meaning... So act as to increase the meaning of present experience.

p.285 every genuine accomplishment... complicates the practical situation. It effects a new distribution of energies which have henceforth to be employed in ways for which past experience gives no exact instruction. Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a new one; and this new one has to enter upon an experimental adventure to find its satisfaction. From the side of what has gone before achievement settles something. From the side of what comes after, it complicates, introducing new problems, unsettling factors. There is something pitifully juvenile in the idea that "evolution," progress, means a definite sum of accomplishment once and for all of just so many perplexities and advancing us just so far on our road to a final stable and unperplexed goal.

p.288-289 New struggles and failures are inevitable. The total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex, and more unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of expansion, not of failures of power, and when grasped and admitted it is a challenge to intelligence. Instruction in what to do next can never come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation.

p.298 Perception of things as they are is but a stage in the process of making them different.

p.299 Intelligent action is... concerned... with consequences to be brought into existence by action conditioned on the knowledge.

p.304 Those who have defined freedom as ability to act have unconsciously assumed that this ability is exercised in accord with desire, and that its operation introduces the agent into fields previously unexplored.

p.304-305 Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid. And the gifts of fortune when they come are fleeting except when they are made taut by intelligent adaptation of conditions. In neutral and adverse circumstances, study and foresight are the only roads to unimpeded action.