5. Observe by introspection your method of recall of historical events you have studied, and note whether _images_ form an important part of your memory material; or does your recall consist chiefly of bare _facts_? In how far does this depend on your method of _learning_ the facts in the first place? 6. Carefully consider your experience from cramming your lessons. Does the material learned in this way stay with you? Do you _understand_ it and find yourself able to _use_ it as well as stuff learned during a longer interval and with more time for associations to form? CHAPTER XII THINKING No word is more constantly on our lips than the word _think_. A hundred times a day we tell what we think about this thing or that. Any exceptional power of thought classes us among the efficient of our generation. It is in their ability to think that men stand preeminently above the animals. 1. DIFFERENT TYPES OF THINKING The term _think_, or _thinking_, is employed in so many different senses that it will be well first of all to come to an understanding as to its various uses. Four different types of thinking which we shall note are:[5] (1) _chance_, or idle, thinking; (2) thinking in the form of _uncritical belief_; (3) _assimilative_ thinking; and (4) _deliberative_ thinking. CHANCE OR IDLE THINKING.--Our thinking is of the chance or idle kind when we think to no conscious end. No particular problem is up for solution, and the stream of thought drifts along in idleness. In such thinking, immediate interest, some idle fancy, the impulse of the moment, or the suggestions from our environment determine the train of associations and give direction to our thought. In a sense, we surrender our mental bark to the winds of circumstance to drive it whithersoever they will without let or hindrance from us. Since no results are sought from our thinking, none are obtained. The best of us spend more time in these idle trains of thought than we would like to admit, while inferior and untrained minds seldom rise above this barren thought level. Not infrequently even when we are studying a lesson which demands our best thought power we find that an idle chain of associations has supplanted the more rigid type of thinking and appropriated the field.