Finally, if an idea has a tendency to connect with a certain response, over and above the bonds due to exercise and effect, it should _always_ manifest that tendency. If the connection is not made, it must be due to the action of some contrary force. It is less my duty to show that the laws of habit can account for hypnotic suggestibility, obsessions, and the like, than it is my opponents’ duty to explain why a man can spend a half day in hospitably welcoming a hundred 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 _is 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 exercise 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 element in question regardless of the gross total situation in which it inheres. A baby thus learns to respond to its mother’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 block, a pencil, a ribbon or a ball. A student thus learns to respond to any plane surface inclosed by three straight lines regardless of its size, shape, color or other than geometrical meaning.