THE LIMITS OF REFLECTION AS A MODIFIER OF INSTINCT AND HABIT. While our impulses and habits may be subjected to the criticism of reflection in the light of the consequences which it can forecast, reflection is itself seriously limited by our original impulses and our acquired habitual ones. On reflection, we may not follow our first impulse, but to act at all is to act on some original or acquired impulse or a combination of them. Which original tendency we shall follow reflection can tell us; it cannot tell us to follow none. In the illustration already used, the student may upon reflection study rather than go out. But the roots of his studying will also lie back in the instincts and habits which are, for better or for worse, his only equipment for action. They will lie back in the tendencies to be curious, to gain the praise of other people and to be a leader among them, in the habits of knowing work thoroughly, of studying in the evening, of maintaining a scholarship average to which he has been accustomed. Reflection may weigh the relative persuasions of various impulses; it cannot ignore them. We may think in order to attain our desires, and may, through reflection, learn to change them; we cannot abolish them. Whether we are curious about our neighbors' business or about the movements of the stars and the possible reactions of a strange chemical element, depends on our previous training and the extent to which inquiry itself has become a fixed and persistent habit. But in any case we are curious. Whether we fight in street brawls or in campaigns against tuberculosis, we are still, as it were, born fighters. Similarly, in the case of habit, we may upon reflection discover that our habits of walking, writing, or speech are bad; that we ought not to smoke, or drink, or waste time. We may come, through reflection, to realize with the utmost clarity the advantages to ourselves of acquiring the habits of going to bed early, saving money, keeping our papers in order, and persisting at work amid distractions. But the bad habits and the good are already fixed in our nervous system, and in physiology also possession is nine tenths of the law. We may _intend_ to change, but by taking thought alone we cannot add a cubit to our stature. Reflection can do no more than point the way we should go. For unless the wrong actions are systematically and repeatedly refrained from, and the proper ones made habitual, thinking remains merely an impotent summary of what can be done. Conduct is governed, it must be repeated, by the satisfactions action can bring us, and unless actions are made habitual they will not be performed with satisfaction.