This conception does not, however, commit us to the view that there is any conscious situation which is totally non-reflective. It may be true that any experience which can properly be termed such comprises something which is _meant_ over and against what is given or there. But there are many situations into which the rational factor--the mutual distinction and mutual reference of fact and meaning--enters only incidentally and is slurred, not accentuated. Many disturbances are relatively trivial and induce only a slight and superficial redefinition of contents. This passing tension of facts against meaning may suffice to call up and carry a wide range of meaningful facts which are quite irrelevant to the intellectual problem. Such is the case where the individual is finding his way through any field which is upon the whole familiar, and which, accordingly, requires only an occasional resurvey and revaluation at moments of slight perplexity. We may call these situations, if we will, knowledge situations (for the reflective function characteristic of knowledge is present), but so denominating them does not do away with their sharp difference from those situations in which the critical qualification of facts and definition of meanings constitute the main business. To speak of the passing attention which a traveler has occasionally to give to the indications of his proper path in a fairly familiar and beaten highway as knowledge, in just the same sense in which the deliberate inquiry of a mathematician or a chemist or a logician is knowledge, is as confusing to the real issue involved as would be the denial to it of _any_ reflective factor. If, then, one bears in mind these two considerations--(1) the unique problem and purpose of every reflective situation, and (2) the difference as to range and thoroughness of logical function in different types of reflective situations--one need have no difficulty with the doctrine that the great obstacle in the development of scientific knowing is that facts and meanings enter such situations with stubborn and alien characteristics imported from other situations.