THE MISBEHAVIORISTS
THE MISBEHAVIORISTS
PSEUDO-SCIENCE
AND THE MODERN TEMPER
BY
HARVEY WICKHAM
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
LINCOLN MAC VEAGH · THE DIAL PRESS
LONGMANS, GREEN & COMPANY
TORONTO
1928
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DIAL PRESS INCORPORATED
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
TO ALL ENQUIRING MINDS, AND TO THOSE DISTURBED
BY THE APPARENT LOGIC IN MANY
CURRENT THEORIES HOSTILE TO THEIR
DEAREST CONVICTIONS, THIS BOOK IS
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I--THE MODERN TEMPER 13
CHAPTER II--BEHAVIORISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 22
1. The Missing Mr. Mind 22
2. An Undecided Synapse 35
3. Eliza Does not Cross the Ice 43
4. Tinks! Tinks! Kwaks! Kwaks! 54
CHAPTER III--DR. MCDOUGALL’S X 67
1. At the Beck of Thirteen Masters 67
2. Psyche Wields the Broom 79
CHAPTER IV--A SLAVE TO DREAMS 88
1. The Confessions of Sigmund Freud 88
2. The Elaboration of a Fiction 104
3. Two Oft-Thwarted Passions 108
4. More Suppositions 117
5. Freud the Metaphysician 129
CHAPTER V--THE FAIRY HALLS OF SCIENCE 139
1. The Idols of the Tribe 139
2. Some Nebulous Matters 150
3. The Bed of Procrustes 159
4. The New Physics 164
5. Chance 174
CHAPTER VI--THE FAMILY TREE 186
1. Are Monkeys People? 186
2. Burbanking the Human Race 201
3. Salvation by Who’s Who 213
CHAPTER VII--THIS UNBELIEVING WORLD 225
1. Dorsey 225
2. The Brazen Bough 242
3. St. Paul as Scapegoat 258
4. The Church as Scapegoat 267
5. The Stories of Duran 280
CHAPTER VIII--THE ANCIENT TEMPER 292
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF TO FACE PAGE
DR. JOHN WATSON 56
“Give me the baby”
PROFESSOR WILLIAM MCDOUGALL 74
Are we trying to say something?
DR. SIGMUND FREUD 104
He tells us his dreams
ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM 202
The Devil take the hindmost!
DR. GEORGE A. DORSEY 238
“We do not use the brains we have”
LEWIS BROWNE 250
Stranger than fiction
WILL DURANT 280
Almost an institution
THE MISBEHAVIORISTS
CHAPTER I
THE MODERN TEMPER
The past appears to be dead.
“If the world of poetry, mythology and religion represents the world
as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he
gradually comes to discover it, we need only compare the two to realize
how irreconcilable they appear,” says Joseph Wood Krutch, associate
editor of _The Nation_ and the author of a biography of Poe, writing
in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1927. “The romantic ideal of
a world well lost for love, and the classic ideal of austere dignity
seem equally ridiculous, equally meaningless when referred, not to the
temper of the past, but the temper of the present.”
Hilaire Belloc is equally insistent as to the existence of this modern
temper, for he remarks in the course of some “Cheerful Thoughts on
Christmas.”[1]
“I think it foolish to disguise from ourselves the plain fact that,
in the societies which abandoned the Faith in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the last supports of Christian doctrine are
breaking down very rapidly indeed. Of the doctrines themselves there is
little left ... while the minority, which still feel some attachment
to some few of these doctrines, feel that attachment in a decreasing
degree and more and more as a vague, dissolving sentiment; less and
less as a principle.
“The old feeling that the doctrines were sacred and intangible, and
that attack upon them was intolerable, has so utterly passed that the
modern generation does not even understand it.... There has been hardly
any defense, hardly any resistance; the last remainder of the creed ...
has been allowed to slip away unnoticed like the last few coins of a
fortune dissipated by a man so debauched as to have lost his memory.”
Both Belloc and Krutch, it will be observed, agree that the world has
changed--that is, that the popular idea as to what life really is,
has changed. They differ only as to the sentiment with which the mass
of the population are supposed to regard the alterations which have
taken place in the view. Belloc, who is a Catholic, believes that
Protestants at least are quite satisfied to have lost the world of
“poetry, mythology and religion”; have in fact “allowed it to slip away
unnoticed.” Krutch, the radical editor, suggests that there has been a
struggle, that science has forced man to give up the world as he would
like to have it and to accept the world as he has gradually come to
discover it--not by making the lost world undesirable, but by making it
seem ridiculous and without actuality.
Krutch, I think, is right, in so far as the vast majority are
concerned. They have resisted, Protestants as well as Catholics,
and many who are neither Catholic nor Protestant but merely lovers
of tradition and of the classic ideal of austere dignity and of the
romantic ideal of a world well lost for love. They have struggled.
They still struggle. But there is an ever increasing demand from some
quarters that the struggle be given up in despair.
Now if science indeed represents the world as man gradually comes to
discover it--that is, if science represents the world as it is; and if
the testimony of scientists as to the nature of this reality be fairly
uniform and uncontradictory, with a growing unanimity promising to
bring an eventual unison out of such discords as may still exist, then
the only thing for the sensible citizen to do is to let the dead past
bury its dead, turn from the grave with as little moaning as possible,
and adapt himself with all speed to changed conditions. The advice,
“Do it now!” is being hurled at him. Why should he not heed it? Nobody
wants to be a mere reactionary, still less to live in a fool’s paradise.
But does science represent the world as the world really is? Can we
say that there is any likelihood of the scientific picture being
more photographically perfect than is, or was, the romantic picture?
Are scientists in agreement, so that there is little or no choice or
opinion offered? Are their theories themselves logically consistent?
What, precisely, is science? And finally, have its findings been
faithfully reported to us?
These are some of the questions which this book attempts to answer.
But before plunging merrily into such a task it may be well to pause
and consider yet further the testimony of Belloc. He may be mistaken
as to people in general, but he is almost incredibly correct in regard
to a small but very influential body of conspicuous persons who may
be described as the Materialistic Philosophers. Scientists some of
them call themselves, and scientists they are--of a sort. But as
they permit themselves to be perpetually hag-ridden by questions of
eschatology--doctrines relating to that ultimate dim Thule towards
which the whole creation does or does not move--philosophy is what they
chiefly have to offer, no matter by what other name they seek to give
it a more modern and therefore presumably sweeter odor.
The ultimate nature of things engrosses them, and just how little they
struggle against the threatened loss of a world of poetry, mythology
and religion may be seen by a quotation taken at random, or, to be
more specific, from “The Mechanist Conception of Life,” by a veritable
general in the materialistic army, Prof. Jacques Loeb, formerly of the
University of California.
“Our wishes and hopes, disappointments and sufferings,” he says,
“have their source in the instincts which are comparable to the light
instincts of the heliotropic animals.”
A tropism, it should perhaps be explained for the benefit of the older
generation, is a tendency to move toward or away from any external
object, the operation being carried out by means of chemical and
mechanical changes within the subject. Thus the heliotrope, which
always strives to turn towards the sun, got its name. It is said to be
positively tropic to light. Prof. Loeb, however, seems to be negatively
tropic in this regard, for he continues:
“The need of the struggle for food, the sexual instinct with its poetry
and its chain of consequences, the maternal instincts with the felicity
and the suffering caused by them ... are the roots from which our inner
life develops. For some of these instincts, the chemical basis is at
least sufficiently indicated to arouse the hope that their analysis
from the mechanistic point of view is only a question of time.”
“Hope,” he says. The second of the virtues, once set between Faith
and Charity, is here involved to express the author’s reaction to the
prospect that some day all the movements of the inner life may be
reduced to the level of so many warping planks exposed to variations
in humidity and to changing temperatures. The modern temper, as it
exists in the minds of those who seek to create and control it,
certainly seems to have become emotionally adjusted to an abandonment
of the classic idea of dignity. Heretofore man has based his pride
chiefly upon his intelligence, the freedom of his will, his possession
of a soul, and his conviction that he was made in the image of God. But
according to the materialists, no mind, no will, no soul exists, and
God is merely the “behavior of the universe.”[2]
“There is no such thing as mind in the old sense of the word,” says J.
B. Eggen.[3] And what is it in the new sense of the word? “It cannot be
considered as ... separate from the body,” Mr. Eggen goes on. Is it the
brain, then--the brain in the old sense of the word? By no means. “The
mind is not a thing with which we react, it is a form of reaction. We
do not think with our brain; there is nothing inside the brain but a
lot of neurones.”
The mind cannot be considered as separate from the body, neither do we
think without brain. With what, then, do we think? Obviously we do not
think at all in the old sense of the word. Thinking, we are about to be
told, is only a collection of motions. And he who “thinks” the theory
cannot be made plausible has yet to read Eggen’s illustrious masters.
But is this science? That same science which has transformed the
appearance of the world and given us the telegraph, the telephone, the
phonograph, the automobile, the electric light, the air-plane, radio,
and television? We shall see.
“The Approaching Crisis” would seem to be well named, and in it Mr.
Wieman, who is also the author of “Religious Experience and the
Scientific Method,” informs us that the decline of religion has been
largely due to its “inadequate adjustment to scientific method and
discovery.” Adding, “At the present time it is research in the field
of psychology and sociology which is demanding a transformation in our
thinking,”--that is, in our notions. Psychology is unquestionably the
most popular form of that “challenge to fundamental beliefs” of which
so much is heard. And Dr. John B. Watson, editor of the _Journal of
Experimental Psychology_, and formerly Professor of Psychology at Johns
Hopkins, makes all former challenges seem weak, for he says--in the
first chapter of his “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist”:
“Psychology, up to very recent times, has been held so rigidly under
the dominance both of traditional religion and of philosophy--the two
great bulwarks of medievalism--that it has never been able to free
itself and become a science.... In the late sixties an attempt was
made” to make it such. “The boast was voiced that psychology ... had
become a science without a soul--that is, a natural science.” But
“notwithstanding the many laboratories here and abroad, it has never
been able to substantiate this claim.... The psychology begun by Wundt
has failed to become a science,”--apparently because some remnants of
soul still cling to it. And Dr. Watson concludes, “Before progress
could be made in astronomy, it had to bury astrology; neurology had
to bury phrenology; and chemistry had to bury alchemy. But the social
sciences, psychology, sociology, political science and economics, will
not bury their medicine men.”
He is speaking, of course, of psychology prior to Dr. Watson, of the
psychology of Wundt, which resulted in the Binet intelligence tests.
This in its day was considered a very materialistic psychology indeed,
superseding the psychology of the William James or the Herbert Spencer
type, which also in its day voiced the boast that it was a science,
tough, and without bowels of compassion. How rapidly we progress. James
lived until 1910, Spencer until 1903. It was not until 1912, when,
according to Dr. Watson, “behaviorism first showed its head,” that
the burying of the medicine men began. And two years later came the
War! The boast can now be voiced without fear of contradiction that
psychology has no soul.
Still if it be true science, and if science be but another name for
reality, I for one am going to get at the burying of my own medicine
men without further delay. I notice a considerable amount of such
burying going on about me. Men are hurrying with the work as if afraid
of being caught with a corpse or two on their hands and undisposed of.
A sort of terror is stalking through the land, afflicting especially
the writers of books and magazine articles--the terror of not being
able to keep up with the Joneses in their employment of the undertaker.
The famous Experimental Method, but late a fugitive, hounded from hole
to corner and from corner to hole, has found influence and capital. It
wields a big stick, or at least a big stick is being wielded in its
name.
It was once said, “Wisdom crieth in the streets, How long ye simple
ones will ye love simplicity?” And now a voice, still purporting to be
Wisdom’s, fairly yells: “Bring us your dead!” One would think that a
pestilence was abroad. Possibly there is. Formerly men bowed down to
the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up, or cast their babes
before the car of Juggernaut. Today they would rather die, some of
them, than be found obstructing the wheels of progress. Science, grown
rich, has acquired such prestige as was once accorded only to Cæsar.
And no wonder. It has given us Copernicus, Galileo, Galvani, Volta,
Faraday, Pasteur, the Curies, Edison, Marconi, Westinghouse, Burbank,
and thousands of others--men for the most part personally poor, but
adding without measure to the material wealth of the world. If all
these men are back of the big stick; if it be they who bid us give up
our God, our souls, wills and even our minds, ordering us to become
accustomed to the idea that we are but machines--and if in doing so
they are sticking to their business and not wandering off into fields
they have failed to make their own, it might (perhaps) be folly to
disobey.
But let us first make certain as to whose voice is on the air. We
have, all of us, a few more or less cherished beliefs. We have grown
up leaning upon--call them props and crutches if you will. Some of us
have even been riveted to moral scruples which, when we try to go in a
direction they forbid, dog us with the clanking hinderance of a ball
and chain. We doubt if we could continue to be good citizens without
them. We do not even know if good citizens, in the old sense of the
word, are any longer desired. Without our props we are likely simply to
fall--and we have never yet seen people walking upright without props
of some sort. We actually doubt the advisability of trying to progress
on all fours.
There are new props, better than the old? Good! Let us see them. Let
us test them, and make sure that they be indeed from science’s own
workshop. And having mentioned the Watson brand of artificial limb, we
may as well begin by experimenting with that, finding out by what still
waters and into what green pastures we may wander with its aid.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _America_, December, 4, 1926.
[2] “The Approaching Crisis,” by Henry Nelson Wieman, teacher of
philosophy at Occidental College, Los Angeles, _Century Magazine_,
November, 1926.
[3] _Current History_, September, 1926.