Our thought here may be rational, but it is not _reasoned_, is not reasoning in the strict sense of the term. In reasoning, although our results may be thought of as concrete things, they are _not suggested immediately by other concrete things_, as in the trains of simply associative thought. They are linked to the concretes which precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are formed by _abstract general characters_ articulately denoted and expressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need neither have been an habitual associate of the datum from which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it. It may be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, something which no simple association of concretes could ever have evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this: that whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive. An empirical, or 'rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if he is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from them as will quite atone for his ignorance. Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented situations--situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all the 'education' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us without resource. =Exact Definition of it.=--_Let us make this ability to deal with novel data the technical differentia of reasoning._ This will sufficiently mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains. _It contains analysis and abstraction._ Whereas the merely empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets 'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the attribute, it must have. Call the fact or concrete datum S; the essential attribute M; the attribute's property P.