BEHAVIORISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
1. THE MISSING MR. MIND
Dr. Watson practically begins his best known book, “Psychology from
the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” with the statement that he is not
concerned with problems of consciousness. And one at first understands
him to mean that in his capacity of behaviorist he is not concerned
with problems of this sort. He knows as a human being, one supposes,
that he is alive. He does not, presumably, address his books to people
in a state of coma. So it would seem that, as a man, he is concerned
not only with his own consciousness but with the consciousness of
others; that he is like the judge who knew something when off the Bench
but refused to know it when on.
As we read, however, this kindly interpretation becomes untenable.
“Consciousness ... is but an indefinable phrase.... Even if [objective
proofs of consciousness] existed, they would exist as isolated,
unmeasurable ‘mental curiosities.’... The behaviorist finds no
evidence for ‘mental existences’ or ‘mental processes’ of any kind....
If behaviorism is ever to stand for anything ... it must make a
clean break with the whole concept of consciousness.” Our thinking
processes “are not different in essence from tennis-playing, swimming,
or any other activity.... Meaning ... never arises in the scientific
observation of behavior.”
Thus far he goes in this one book. In a previous volume[4] he merely
concluded that “one can assume either the presence or absence of
consciousness ... without affecting the problems of behavior by one
jot or one tittle.” But in “The Myth of the Unconscious”[5] he throws
subterfuge to the winds and says plainly:
“The behaviorist finds no ‘mind’ in his laboratories, sees it nowhere
in his subjects ... if the behaviorists are right, then ... _there can
be no such thing as consciousness_.”
Why? Because “personality ... is the reaction-mass as a whole.” Can you
put marbles in a bag and shake them till the mass of their reactions
becomes aware of itself? Obviously not. Accepting for the sake of
argument the definition of personality as it appears from the Watson
“standpoint,”--there is no argument. Logic leads us straight into
nothing. This is also the conclusion of J. S. Moore, who contends
that _content_ when accented upon the first syllable signifies merely
_context_--not the thing inside (there is no thing inside) but the
things around it. Which makes it clear that I have been guilty of gross
presumption in even trying to attach meaning to “psychology from the
standpoint of a behaviorist.”
This may sound like an attempt to be funny, to make cheap humor out of
random extracts from a book half or not at all understood, but whether
I understand psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist or not, I
was never more serious in my life. Not only Dr. Watson but many other
adult men are solemnly asking us with perfectly straight faces if we
dare to call not our souls but ourselves our own. And if we nod an
affirmative, they smile in their beards, and imply that we must have
lacked early advantages.
But it will be urged it cannot be that so large a number of university
professors have gone mad. They must have some way of deceiving
themselves. And indeed they have. Metaphysics has been defined as
the art of befuddling one’s self methodically, and of metaphysics of
this sort none are so fond as those who decry metaphysics altogether.
“Reaction-mass as a whole” sounds like a reasonable expression, does it
not? Abstractions always do. And yet reactions can have no mass. They
are only movements, not the things which move. Try and get any meat out
of a movement and see what you have for dinner.
But these fallacies do not usually travel alone. Watsonianism in
particular is fond of the company of facts. It mixes up Behaviorism,
as a mere study of behavior, in a vast confusion of Psychology,
Physiology, Ethics and irreligion. It seeks now to blind us with
passion, now to swamp us in detail--lest we remember what we are
talking about.
Thus Dr. Watson’s great book bristles with facts--pages and pages of
them taken straight from physiology. He divides our bodies into three
groups of parts, according to function--receptors, conductors and
effectors. The receptors receive impressions from the outer world and
are nothing but our old friends, the five senses--eyes, ears, nose, the
taste-buds of the tongue, and those areas (chiefly of cuticle) which
are sensitive to touch. The conductors are the nerves. The effectors,
or the bringers about of effects, are the muscles and glands. Now
the glands, at least those of the endocrine or ductless variety, are
comparatively new-comers in the world of knowledge. But the other
things are as familiar as doctors’ bills. There have been changes in
nomenclature, nothing more.
Yet these changes are significant. Receptors take the place of the
senses because (in all seriousness) the behaviorist wishes to get rid
of that hateful word “sense” and its implications. A similar motive
must have been active when it came to naming the secretions from the
ductless glands. They used to be called Hormones, meaning “I stir up.”
This no doubt was objectionable, because some of the hormones do not
stir us up; they quiet us down. Dr. Watson knows them all as autocoids,
which has the advantage of being non-committal in this regard. What is
more to the point, it implies something automatic. Let us see how they
work.
But right here we are met by a lack of knowledge. The secretions from
only a few of the endocrines (notably andrenin and thyroxin) have as
yet been isolated and analyzed. But there is good reason for believing
that they regulate, to a certain extent at least, not only the ductless
glands among themselves but (through the sympathetic nerves) the action
of the unstriped muscles which control the stomach, intestines and
various other unconscious or vegetative processes.
Autocoidal secretion seems to be very much at the beck and call of our
emotions, or else our emotions are very much at the beck and call of
our autocoids; but whether you hitch the cart before the horse or the
horse before the cart, the believer in human freedom need be no more
alarmed over the autocoids than he is over the fact that drugs have
certain effects when taken into the system. It was known even in the
ages of faith that a man was not quite himself after partaking too
freely even of a drug so charmingly outward mannered as is alcohol.
The behaviorism of the autocoids is more obscure. They become
conspicuous chiefly by their absence. Thus the removal of the
parathyroids (part of the thyroid apparatus situated on either side
of the larynx and windpipe) produces convulsions. Its autocoid is
therefore believed to be of a restraining type. The removal of the
thyroids themselves produces cretinism, and thyroxin, their active
principle (it is sixty percent iodine) was isolated only recently by
E. C. Kendall, of the Mayo Foundation. Suprarenal extract (from the
suprarenal apparatus near the kidneys) aids in recovery from fatigue.
As to the pituitary apparatus at the base of the brain, “gigantism is
supposed to be due to an overactive anterior lobe; obesity and sexual
infantilism to the lack of secretion of the posterior lobe.” (Watson.)
The thymus gland (in the neck near the thyroids) is believed by Dr.
Walter Timme to be linked with the pineal (which is a part of the brain
structure) in a related system dominating the life cycle from birth to
puberty. If the function of the pineal is disturbed in children, “there
is a rapid development of the reproductive organs, precocity, and an
increased growth of skeleton. It is thus supposed that this gland
furnishes an inhibitory autocoid.” (Watson.)
To the absence of the puberty gland (also called the interstitial, and
endocrine not to be confounded with the gonads, or true sex cells,
to which is entrusted the reproductive function)--to the absence of
the puberty gland is attributed the observed effects of castration,
and “there is a growing tendency on the part of investigators ...
to believe that man is as old as his glands.” Therefore, “since the
remaining glands apparently cannot stay youthful in the absence of
a sufficient output from the puberty glands, it is only natural to
connect senescence or old age with the decline in the output from
this gland.” (Watson.) Hence all the experiments in rejuvenation, the
transplantation of glands from monkeys and goats, made from the days
of Brown-Sequard (famous about the year 1889) down to those made by
Steinach, Voronoff and many others of the present time. Thus the simian
becomes our “glandcestor,” so to speak, whether he be our forbear or
not.
But let us take leave of all this physiology and observe what sort of
psychology we can get from our receptors, conductors and effectors
under experimental conditions.
For convenience sake, the behaviorist calls whatever happens to the
victim of an experiment the “stimulus” or “situation,” and whatever
the victim does in consequence the “response.” So we will imagine
that a stimulus of some sort, say the spectacle of Eliza crossing the
ice, impinges upon a receptor--in this case the retina. Physically,
this is a light stimulus, and for a brief instant Eliza may be said
to be all in your eye. But a conductor (the optic nerve) takes the
matter up and transmits an impulse (in the form of a “wave of chemical
decomposition”) to the brain. Here it encounters a lot of cells, called
neurones. If J. B. Eggen be right in saying that “there is nothing
inside the brain but a lot of neurones,” it could not well encounter
anything else.
A neurone under the microscope looks somewhat like a bush which
has been pulled up by the roots. The ball of earth adhering to it
represents the nucleus, or brain-cell proper. The branches are called
dendrites, and in the human body they extend from sometimes less than
a millimeter to sometimes more than a yard in length--in the latter
case becoming what the layman usually means when he says “nerves.” Each
nucleus possesses several, often a great number, and it is through
these dendrites that it receives the neural, or nervous, impulse
which it passes on through its axone to the next cell. There should
be a small tap-root to our bush, terminating in brush-like fibres, to
represent this axone. Usually there is but one to a cell, though it may
send off collaterals.
We have many millions of these neurones, each one complicated beyond
belief if examined in detail. But let us not venture too far into that
awful tangle of vaguely definable structures where even the neurologist
gropes with difficulty, and about which he is constrained to make his
tentative conclusions with bated breath. But it may be well to note
that neurones are of three sorts. Let us call them receiving neurones,
association neurones, and sending neurones; and let us liken them to
three lines of soldiers, the receivers busily getting information from
No Man’s Land, the associators passing it on to the senders operating
the artillery. Receptors, conductors and effectors again. But out of
fairness to Dr. Watson it should be said that he calls them nothing of
the sort. In fact, he thinks that “entirely too much” has been made of
the association neurone, and “of the whole localization of function.”
The brain is not popular with behaviorists anywhere, for sometimes it
shows a tendency to upset their most cherished theories.
Nevertheless the brain is there, and Eliza is crossing the ice. The
brain sees her. How? Through its receiving neurones. A soldier out
in No Man’s Land holds a camera (the eye) in his hand, or dendrite,
and takes her picture, which he transfers to his other hand, or axone,
ready to pass on. It is like one of these very modern pictures sent by
telegraph, for all he receives or passes on is a series of shocks, or
“waves of chemical decomposition.” The effect would be the same if the
soldiers communicated by means of hand-clasps, a Morse code of squeezes
or taps,--something like that.
The second soldier (association neurone) having possessed himself of
the picture, relays it in turn to the third--one who is in touch with
the guns, which in this case are the muscles and glands. The truth,
of course, is not quite so simple as this. There are probably nine
billion neurones to begin with, each supplied with numerous arms. Any
association neurone appears to be able to get in touch with every other
neurone in either of the other two classes, and even the simplest
picture or bit of information must manifest itself in an unconscionable
number of waves or impulses, each one quite meaningless in itself.
What a wild tumult of activity must be taking place within us when the
battle outside waxes hot!
Nor are all the observation posts outside. Many are within the body.
And from the data which they all transmit emotions and coördinate
actions are born--at least so behaviorists would have us believe. The
striped muscles twitch, and bones are jerked about. The unstriped
muscles are stimulated to action, and the viscera are affected. The
ductless glands increase their secretions, or suspend them. This, say
the behaviorists, is what makes us brave; or cowardly; wild with rage
or tender with love. Our bowels of compassion are moved. Perhaps we
have no stomach for a fight. If we run away the vulgar will declare
that we have no guts.
But we cannot always be thinking of neurones individually, so we think
of them in chains. When two get in touch with each other (through the
axone of the one and the dendrite of the other) the connection is
called a synapse. When the chain includes all three sorts of neurones,
it is called a reflex arc.
A reflex is what happens when you strike the patellar tendon of the
knee with the side of your hand, with a tack-hammer, or with what Dr.
Watson prefers to call “a percussion hammer.” The leg registers a
kick, because the blow sets up a wave of chemical decomposition in the
dendrites of the receiving neurones which are nearest concerned; the
wave passes to certain association neurones, and by them is passed to
the kicking (striped) muscle. That is, it passes through a reflex arc,
one of the several reflex arcs which are already in working order when
we are born. Which means that the association neurones here involved
have somehow already been educated to relay all despatches to the
neurones which operate the kick--and to none other. So this reflex arc
is called “unconditioned,” and the stimulus which sets it in motion is
said to be a “natural” stimulus. An unconditioned reflex is practically
a tropism. Prof. Loeb ordered it to get busy and account for all
behavior, human and other. It fell down on the job. We have not, it
seems, enough knee and similar jerks to enable us to write a Ninth
Symphony with their aid alone. Some other trifle was needed.
Dr. Watson says he has it--in the conditioned reflex. It is possible,
we find, to get a reflex to respond to a stimulus which is not its
“natural” stimulus. Food, for example, is the natural stimulus of the
reflex arc operating the salivary glands. The mouth waters when we
begin to eat. But the Russian, Pavlov, bored holes in the cheeks of a
dog, brought the salivary ducts into the open, and discovered that not
only would the dog’s mouth water at the contact of food, but that it
would water at the mere sight of food. Then he rang a bell for several
days at feeding time, and had the satisfaction eventually of seeing
the dog’s mouth begin to water when the bell was rung and no food was
anywhere about.
Prof. Lashley, of the Hopkins Laboratory, has since invented an
instrument which can be fastened to the inside of the cheek by means of
suction, so that the secretions may be led to a tube without a surgical
operation--which is a convenience when the victim is human. He has thus
ascertained how many drops per minute was the normal slaver, and that
chocolate in the (human) subject’s hand increased it from three to five
times; the smell of chocolate, five times; chocolate brought to the
lips, nine times. “It may be said,” observes Bertrand Russell[6] “that
modern psychology consists of the discovery by the professors of what
everybody else has always known.”
Yet it must be confessed that we did not know the number of drops
of saliva which lay behind the licking of our chops in the presence
of something good, or that the sight and smell of chocolate were
“unnatural” or “substituted” stimuli--still less that the substitution
of unnatural for natural stimuli was both the foundation and
superstructure of “education.”
But we know now that we can obtain the knee-jerk by blowing a whistle,
or cause the iris to contract at the smell of asafœtida. We have but
to flash a bright light every time the herb is introduced into the
vicinity; or (if I may use such old-fashioned language), associate
whistles with percussion hammers in the “mind” of the subject.
Association is all it is. If you have learned to expect to be blinded
by radiance every time you get a whiff of asafœtida, your eyes will
begin to protect themselves even in the dark. If the sound of a whistle
leads you to anticipate a blow on the patellar tendon, your leg will
fly forward--at least theoretically. To get practical results, this
education must begin very early.
But I have used the words “mind,” “expect,” “anticipate,” and many
expressions which imply conscious intelligence. In behaviorism all
these are barred. The new stimuli are said to be “grafted” on the old
stimuli, not upon the consciousness. All that can be said, then, is
that when two stimuli, one natural and one unnatural, happen at the
same time on a sufficient number of occasions, the reflex becomes
conditioned so that it will do its stuff when the unnatural stimulus
happens alone.
One other item and the mechanical foundation of psychology from the
standpoint of a behaviorist will be complete. There are certain
reflexes called “emotional reflexes.” These are the things we do when
we are afraid, angry, or in love--for Dr. Watson traces all emotions
back to one of these three. Some go further, lump fear and anger
together, and give us an emotional outfit reducable to likes and
dislikes.
The new-born babe, Dr. Watson tells us, is afraid of nothing but loud
noises and the sudden loss of physical support. These, then, are
the natural stimuli of fear. Nothing but restraint makes him angry.
Restraint, therefore, is the natural stimulus of fury. To prove it,
the behaviorist drops a baby face downwards on a pillow, and notes that
it clenches its hands as if in the attempt to grab something to prevent
itself from falling. He hammers on an iron bar behind the infant ear,
and observes that there is crying and shrinking away. He grips the
little arms, and a struggle ensues.
As to love, Dr. Watson is not so clear. In one place he speaks of
the reaching out of the baby arms as being prophetic of the nuptial
embrace. In another he describes the natural love stimulus as a
stroking of the erogenous zones. These zones, to be blunt, are the
genitals, the breasts, the anal region and certain other portions of
the surface of the body especially sensitive to touch. Perhaps there
are two sorts of love, the active and the passive; just as there may
be two sorts of dislike, shrinking fear and self-assertive rage. The
former professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins can hardly be blamed
for not making it plain. He is not the first who has been obfuscated by
love.
But whatever love may be, the love-reflex, like the fear-reflex, the
anger-reflex, or the unemotional motor-reflexes such as the knee-jerk,
may be conditioned by having unnatural stimuli grafted on to their
natural stimuli by bringing the natural and unnatural together in the
field of their experience.
Albert, for example, the eleven-months old infant of a wet-nurse in the
Hopkins Laboratories, was not naturally afraid of rats, a rat being
neither a sudden loss of support nor a big noise. He reached out for
a rat as readily as he reached for anything else. But every time he
reached, an operator standing out of sight beat heavily upon an iron
bar. So the reflex arc, beginning with the ear and ending in such
glands as distill cowardice or inhibit courage, grafted itself on to
the reflex arc beginning with the rat-wave coming through the eye and
terminating in the striped muscles that jerk the hand forward. And, as
often happens, the grafter eventually won the day.
“At the first experiment,” rat and noise being presented together,
“the infant jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the
mattress--he did not cry, however.” But “at the eighth experiment,”
seven days later, when the rat alone was shown, “the baby began to cry.
Almost instantly he turned sharply away, so rapidly that he was caught
with difficulty before he reached the end of the table.”[7]
Albert is now afraid of rats, there is no least doubt of that. You may
throw your bang-bang instrument away, he will continue to recoil from
rats. And not from rats only. The fear extends to furry animals of
all sorts, to human hair, to cotton wool. In this instance it did not
extend to the nurse, but sometimes it does. The fear stimulus is apt to
graft itself on to whatever other stimuli happen to be operating.
Thus are emotional reflexes conditioned--by a performance which has
a remarkable resemblance to the old method of punishing a child for
wrong-doing, except that wrong-doing on the child’s part is omitted as
a necessary condition precedent.
This is psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. From the
standpoint of a psychologist it looks as if all trace of psychology had
thus far been carefully left out; for psychology is the study of the
psyche, the soul, of the conscious self, or that part of the self which
has at least the capacity of becoming conscious. Dr. Watson says not.
He thinks that psychology is the study of the reaction-mass. Anyway, he
is convinced that reaction-mass psychology is all the psychology needed
to explain everything. Mr. Mind may be missing, but he never will be
missed. “The behaviorist asks for nothing to start with in building
a human being but the squirmings everyone can see in the newborn
infant.”[8]
It is not asking for much, so we will now let him try.
2. AN UNDECIDED SYNAPSE
Eliza is still crossing the ice. The spectacle (in the form of a series
of waves of chemical decomposition) is on its way, through reflex arcs,
to striped and unstriped muscles; to ductless glands; to effectors, in
short. It is time that some action ensued, that behavior on Eliza’s
part resulted in behavior on the part of the spectator.
Let us suppose that the spectator most interested is a bloodhound. “The
behaviorist,” we learn from Dr. Watson[9] “recognizes no dividing line
between man and brute,” save (he adds later) perhaps in the matter of
“language.” As the occasion here affords no time for talk, a bloodhound
will serve as well as Senator Borah. Now what will the bloodhound do?
Were his reflexes unconditioned, he would do nothing of any
consequence. On the unlikely chance of Eliza throwing a stone and
hitting him on the patellar tendon, he might do a knee-jerk. Or, should
her shadow come between him and the sun, the iris of his fearful eyes
might contract. But none of these things happen. Eliza furnishes no
natural stimuli upon which an unconditioned reflex could act. Prof.
Loeb, with all his tropisms, would be able to bring no real drama about.
This is a Watson bloodhound, however--a trained dog. All sorts of
unnatural stimuli have been grafted upon his reflexes. For one thing,
he has had the sight of little girl and the taste of little girl
brought simultaneously into his experience a great many times. So the
glands in his cheeks advance immediately from a salivary output of,
say, five drops per minute, to some forty-five. He probably snaps his
jaws, a “seeking motion” prompted by the emotion of love--for meat. Not
only that, but he bounds forward--another seeking motion, which was
once, I presume a puppy squirm. Anyway he bounds forward, and Eliza
is caught. Or else he does not bound forward, but stands and sniffs,
whines, or gives tongue, thus bridging the space between animal and
man, but flatly refusing to attempt to leap the space of open water
between dog and Eliza’s cake of ice.
But why? Why does not the dog act automatically in obedience to
the waves of chemical decomposition faithfully transmitted to his
effectors? The villain of uncertainty lies in that intermediate set
of neurones--those association neurones which Dr. Watson thinks have
received already altogether too much attention. Some of their dendrites
have made synapse with axones laden with the fear of the cold wetness
of ice-water, and have communicated, not with the leaping but with the
sniffing, whining and baying muscles, leaving the legs merely trembling.
What? Have the association neurones some choice as to the synapses
they shall make? Is it left to them to say which, of a multitude of
differently charged axones, their dendrites shall shake hands with?
Does not mechanics govern the connection which the association neurone
effects with a million waiting dendrites already linked with a million
different effectors? Is our soldier in the middle row permitted to suit
himself as to what listening-post he shall get in touch with, and is he
then allowed to do as he likes with the information?
What was lately a mere relay instrument seems suddenly to have been
endowed with strange powers. If ever an arrangement was devised to
look like the physical embodiment of consciousness and free will,
this certainly is it. No wonder Dr. Watson would prefer to have us
regard these brain areas as vague “silent” ones, wherein no function
can be “localized.” A behaviorist who should lose his unconsciousness
would be more frightened than was Peter Schlemihil when he lost his
shadow to the devil. The mere suggestion that the association neurone
might be the Achilles’ heel of insensibility must have shocked many
a conditioned reflex back into infantilism. Dr. Watson remained and
remains calm and aloof in the midst of his “silent areas.” But others
bestirred themselves with considerable zeal if not discretion. The
problem was to find some purely blind and mechanistic agent capable of
regulating the resistance of the synapse.
For that is the best way to think of it--as a resistance. A neural
impulse will go farther in a given time along a simple nerve than it
will along a route interrupted by neurones with little gulfs between
them. Not only that, but when it comes out it is found to be measurably
weaker than when it went in. Almost immediately it picks up again, and
goes on, full speed ahead, as if somebody had stepped on the gas. How
this little miracle is accomplished, nobody knows; nor whence comes
the added force. Doubtless, however, it comes from the body in some
perfectly natural and ascertainable way. Certainly it has nothing to
do with the will.
Has the synapse? That depends upon what causes its resistance to vary.
The association neurone itself cannot possibly be the will. The very
fact that it is observable under the microscope proves that. The most
hopeful field of inquiry, therefore, is that of the resistance which
is offered the neural impulse on its way from one neurone to another.
If this resistance varies--and it does--it is possible to conceive how
the disturbances from the outside world may be sifted, some ignored
and some allowed full play in the responses which follow. Here would
be Psyche, locking and unlocking her doors. I do not say that this
is exactly what happens. Our knowledge of the brain, though vastly
more complete than it was ten years ago, is still far too fragmentary
to permit of the localization of function to this extent. I am only
offering a hypothesis to explain the workings of a belief arrived at in
quite another fashion from the one we are following here.
The synapse offers the least resistance in what used to be called
the field of conscious attention; and by fancying that attention
moved about from one brain-area to another without constraint and in
conformity with some non-physical law, we used to, in the good old
days, be able to picture free will in action--not with much pretense to
accuracy of detail, but in a way which was at least intelligible.
Physical scientists never liked this loose-footed field of attention.
If it moved about, they wanted to know what moved it. Even if attention
be only an area of super-“neutrition,” it could hardly move without
force--a fact which some psychologists, desperately anxious to be free
but having no force to put at the will’s disposal, have tried in vain
to get around.
But behaviorists will have nothing to do with conscious attention,
free or bound. And as it was obviously necessary to find something to
regulate synapsial resistance, they proceeded to find it.
It was soon discovered that the neural impulse, having once traversed a
particular route, found the way thereafter easier, just as we find it
easier to walk through snow after somebody has broken a trail. Repeated
synapses, therefore, may be left in charge of Habit. But there has to
be a first time. Habit, itself, depends upon this first time for its
own direction; for habit follows the line of least resistance which
this very first time creates. And the first time, the time of times,
which determines all other times by wearing the initial path through
the cranial snow, is--behavioristically speaking--determined by Chance!
What behaviorists wanted was to have nothing determine the first
synapse, and not being mathematicians they fell into the error of
supposing that chance was nothing, or the next thing to it. In reality
they could not have made a worse selection. But, granting their
premises, there was really nothing else to choose.
But let us call to the stand a distinguished witness as to the reality
of the choice having been made. Chance leads me to select Prof. C. H.
Warren, whose “A Study of Purpose” was first published in the _Journal
of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method_.[10] It chances that
I have access to certain passages from this paper. Also he happens not
to be a thoroughgoing behaviorist, as may be seen from the fact that
he speaks of “purposive action” and of “ideas.” Bertrand Russell is
of the opinion that there is only one thoroughgoing behaviorist in
the world--Dr. Watson, to wit. I even hope to show that Dr. Watson
steps out of his rôle in certain desperate pinches. But Prof. Warren
is sufficiently mechanistic to warrant his being heard. He says:
“The notion of purpose arose from a certain definite type of human
experience. The typical purposive experience consists of a thought of
some future occurrence followed by a series of actions which culminate
in the very situation which the original idea represented. A human act
is said to be purposive when it is preceded by an idea representing the
situation which the act itself brings about.”
Not quite as clear as a crystal, but it means that I light my pipe,
not because I want to smoke but because I foresee that I will light
it. Dr. Watson says practically the same thing, only he points out
that the motions which provoke desire are small, observable only by
means of instruments. “Visceral phenomena,” for instance. And he
makes the statement thoroughly behavioristic by adding that these
visceral phenomena _are_ desire, the only kind of desire which
exists. But causes must precede effect, so Prof. Warren is trying to
make “foreknowledge” serve for the needed something to touch off the
visceral phenomena and bring desire into being.
He goes on to describe how he turns on the electric light in his
study--not because he wants to read, but because he foresees that he
is going to press the button and that then there will be light--in a
physical sense, at least. He admits “desire” into the realm of being
only after the action has begun, and explains it as a “kinesthetic
image,”--that is, an image derived from the muscular sense. Which means
that he begins to want to read, and that I begin to want to smoke,
only after our muscles are on the way to produce smoke and light in
available quantities. And he further testifies. “If the thought of an
action leads to the production of that particular action ... rather
than to any one of the thousands of other kinesthetic experiences,
the reason is that a definite association has previously been formed
between this particular thought and this particular impulse. The origin
of such an association _may be attributed to chance occurrence_.”
It is interesting to speculate upon what would have occurred had Prof.
Warren chanced first to associate the electric light button with
kinesthetic experiences originating in his feet instead of in his
hands. What if he had been standing on his head amusing the children on
that momentous day? Or, since he probably made his first acquaintance
with electric light early in life, what if when playing circus as a boy
he had accidentally _kicked_ the button from “Off” to “On”? Obviously
he would have obtained the fateful foresight that kicks will produce
light. And he would have been destined all his life to play the acrobat
before ever the kinesthetic experiences of his muscles could instigate
in him the desire to read after dusk. Nor is it possible that he could
have been rescued from his fate save by another chance experience yet
more kinesthetically violent.
“The synapse,” says Professor Pillsbury, sensibly enough, “is the
point where action leaves its impress upon the nervous system.” But he
does not grow lyrical about it. For lyricism we must go to Miss Clara
Stevens, a real behaviorist. She thus deposes and sings in _The Open
Court_:[11] “Here [in the synapse] lies the basis of character and
destiny. No need of a recording angel to set down our shortcomings
against us. The mystic synapse is recorder; and avenger as well. Its
use renders it all-powerful ... its neglect bars further way for either
temptation on the one hand or profitable deeds on the other. We can
only act and think in the future as we have habituated the synapse in
the past.”
Surely the lady has allowed her enthusiasm to carry her too far. How
can we have anything to do with the habituating of a synapse which is
governed by chance? She tries to find a way out by maintaining that
the original neural impulse may be determined “by such a material fact
... as nutrition supplied or withheld by the cell-body.” Does the
cell-body, then, have a will of its own, so that it can either issue or
withhold supplies? That were power indeed. And she speaks throughout
her article of “mystery,” “inclination,” “motives,” “ambitions,”
“tolerance,” “bigotry,” “principle,” “idealistic acts,” “clearness of
judgment,” and “firmness of purpose.”
I have wronged her. Here we have no behaviorist, but a good woman
trying to be a behaviorist but unable to leave all her commonsense
behind her--a woman born, happily, without a trace of logic, and spared
by chance from acquiring any. Not that Miss Stevens is one whit more
illogical than is Dr. Watson. She is merely less obscure. On pages 319
to 321 of “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” we are
given a list of six “determiners of acts,” and told that “of course
the most important determiner is the life-history of the individual.”
And the other five are mere portions of life-history. Dr. Watson is
fond of the word Genetics, yet he carefully avoids the subject of true
beginnings.
And Eliza still is crossing the ice. The bloodhound still is doing
something or nothing. Somehow, with all this “psychology” and with all
Dr. Watson’s mass of reactions at our disposal, we cannot get things to
move. It will be necessary to try again.
3. ELIZA DOES NOT CROSS THE ICE
“The behaviorist,” Dr. Watson assures us,[12] “can take [the]
squirmings of the new-born--his unorganized finger movements, the
movements of his arms, legs, feet and toes, the squirmings in his
trunk, and weave them into highly complicated acts of sport, of
skill--such as driving a nail with a hammer, carving with a knife,
shooting with bow and arrow, or tennis-playing, climbing, crawling,
running and walking. [He] can take the squirmings of the throat
muscles, and weave them into those highly organized acts we call
talking and singing--and, yes, even thinking. [He] can take the
infantile squirmings of the gut--the unstriped muscular tissue of the
alimentary tracts, diaphragm, heart, respiration, etc.--and actually
organize them into those complicated emotional responses we call fears,
loves and rages.... Give [him] just one hundred ‘squirmings’ ... and
let [him] tie them together by [his] methods, and [he will] have more
than enough.”
This is a comprehensive programme; if it is carried out it ought
to be able not only to get Eliza across the ice but to produce the
whole play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Certainly one hundred squirmings are
enough--enough of squirming. Their mere combination would produce an
untold number--of squirms. And lest some might doubt as to this, Dr.
Watson calls attention to that mathematical formula known as “factorial
n.”
By factorial n one can determine the number of ways in which a given
number of things can be put together. The calculation is accomplished
by taking the given number and multiplying it by a number one less than
itself; and then multiplying this result by a multiplier less by one
than the first multiplier; and so on, the multiplier shrinking until
it reaches zero. For instance, how many ways are there of arranging
six books upon a shelf? The answer is amazing enough. For six times
five times four times three times two, equals seven hundred and twenty,
and we have limited the combinations to arrangements along a single
straight line. One hundred squirms may be combined in enough different
ways to satisfy the most captious. Factorial one hundred would, if
worked out, look like an inter-allied debt.
But are squirms all we are looking for? What does Dr. Watson mean by
“those complicated emotional responses we call fears, loves and rages?”
He has used such words before, and it is time he were called to an
account. There is no such thing as consciousness. Can there still be
such a thing as an emotion? Yes, says Dr. Watson.
We are now in the presence of one of the most preposterous attempts at
hocus-pocus ever recorded in the history of the human race. William
James prepared the way by saying, “We feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike,” etc. But with James there was always the
possibility of assuming that an emotion is what we feel of the various
motions involved. At worst it was but the natural order of things
reversed. And in James, if one does not like his philosophy of the
moment, the totally different philosophy of some other moment is never
far to seek. But now that there is no such thing as consciousness,
there would seem to be no way of feeling even a motion. Ergo, an
emotion is merely motion. Squirms. The behaviorist asks for nothing
else. Does he not?
“An emotion,” says Dr. Watson,[13] “is an hereditary ‘action pattern’
involving profound changes of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but
particularly of the glandular systems.” This is at least consistent. An
emotion is a group of motions which have been somehow linked together
into a pattern by reflex arcs before we were born. He then speaks of
emotion as a raising of the “bodily tone,”--that is, a speeding up,
an increase in the general average and celerity of motions. Still
consistent, however absurd. But why did Albert, the eleven-months old
infant of that wet-nurse at the Hopkins Laboratories, “turn sharply
away” at the eighth experiment, when the rat alone was shown him?
Because he had learned to associate rats with a loud noise of which he
was afraid. But does not this imply that he _disliked_ the noise?
By a wild stretch of the imagination, I think I can almost see what is
in the behaviorist’s mind when he bids us believe that like and dislike
can exist in a creature without consciousness. He means that there is
no like or dislike about it; that what we call likes and dislikes are
certain chemical changes which make us move either towards or away
from objects. Tropisms, in short. I do not quite see how the mechanism
for such phenomena could be arranged, but this may be merely because
the mechanism of a tropism is too complicated for my comprehension.
Likes and dislikes vary so much even when the same objects and the same
people are involved. We are not simple in the way that a mariner’s
compass is simple, its north pole always liking the south pole of a
magnet, always disliking its fellow.
Consciousness itself is a complicated matter. For instance, we are
never directly conscious of it; we are only conscious of objects. Our
inmost self can only contemplate that which is not our inmost self. The
eye does not see the eye, though it can observe its reflection in a
mirror.
Things also happen of which we are not centrally conscious at
all--things, for example, to which we are paying no attention. They
yet have their effect. Can likes and dislikes perform their functions,
then, without our knowing anything about it? I am for the moment quite
willing to admit it--in the case of Dr. Watson. For all I know to
the contrary, he may never be conscious. He would not be the first
epistemologist who has made such a claim. But he does not claim just
this. The behaviorist finds no consciousness “in his laboratories,”
none “in his subjects.” He implies that _I_ am never conscious, and
there I know he is wrong.
Now since consciousness exists, in me at least (the reader must speak
for himself), it probably has a function. So far as I am concerned, it
is the one important--the only important--thing in life. Why, then, try
to leave it out of the explanation of Albert’s acquired dislike for
rats?
It might have been well enough to leave it out of the description of
Albert’s behavior. If behaviorism were merely what its name implies,
the detailed study of the way people other than the observer behave, it
might be useful and certainly would not be ridiculous. But it seeks to
be psychology and philosophy as well. It assumes, as we soon shall see,
to instruct us in ethics and to overthrow religion. It fancies that it
has deprived us of will.
Your consciousness and mine are of course two different phenomena,
severed by the gulf which yawns between _meum_ and _tuum_. I do not
know that you are aware in the same way that I know that I myself am
aware. I merely assume that you are. You look much like me. You behave
much as I do. Therefore, as an act of courtesy, I grant that you are
probably sentient and know what you are about--for the simple reason
that I feel sure that I am sentient and know what I am about.
But all I am positively and subjectively certain of, as to you, is
what I observe you to do. This observation may be extended, with
your permission, to your insides. I may insert tubes which tap your
glands. I may induce you to swallow rubber balloons, which I then fill
with hot water (an experiment mentioned by Dr. Watson), and note the
resultant reactions upon your muscles, smooth and striped. Still, all
I know about you is what strikes my senses, which in the last analysis
resolves itself into motions, large or small, of your body and members.
The behaviorist’s contention that an individual is merely the sum
of his acts fits you well enough from my point of view. Were I not
conscious myself, I would never even dream that you are conscious. If I
did not reason, I would not be wise enough to suppose that you do. Did
I not feel emotion, pleasure, and pain, I would be the last person to
accuse you of feeling them.
Now Dr. Watson, when he assumes that because he finds no consciousness
in his subjects there is therefore no such thing as consciousness, is
entirely justified--if he is himself an unconscious man. But I fancy
he is merely paying us the compliment of confusing himself with us.
He is unable to put his hands upon _our_ minds or feelings because
they are forever hidden within us, and will never, never, never
permit themselves to be isolated, taken apart and chemically analyzed.
That which is objective is conduct--it is not feeling. Certain light
waves are felt as redness--but the waves are not the redness. Outside
ourselves, everything of red exists, saving and excepting only its
redness. Now is or is not redness an important part of red?
The brain is indeed but a few billion neurones, slightly damp. Dr.
Watson, fumbling among them, sees only certain motions of matter.
Naturally he sees no mind. But he modestly forgets that all the while
he is observing these motions of ours and attributing them to other
motions, and these to yet other motions, and so on _ad infinitum_, he
is using his own mind--and a very ingenious mind it is, thus to reason
itself out of existence. We all remember how granny used to lose her
specs and look for them everywhere--through the very specs in question,
which were all the while on the end of her nose.
Consciousness is a fact of consciousness, the most obtrusive fact in
all the world. But it is not a fact outside of consciousness. There it
is only an inference. Should Dr. Watson get hit on the head by a brick
falling from his laboratory chimney (which God forbid!), he would not
be immediately able to observe whether a dog’s salivary secretions were
increased by the sight and smell of chocolate or not.
Knowledge of glands can “amplify our conception,”[14] says Levine, “but
it by no means abolishes the need for a mental state.”
“Not even by poetic license,” adds Sidney Hook,[15] “can the earth be
created through a deft masonry of its derivative effects.” Neither
can the mind. Or as J. R. Kantor, of the University of Indiana,
expresses it in his “Principles of Psychology,”--“The writers who
hold such doctrines [that psychology is a matter of neuro-muscular
or neuro-glandular responses] inevitably face the consequence of
neglecting the description of most of the actual content not only of
human but of animal psychology.”
Says William James,[16] “Cases ... prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield.... Nothing would be more natural
than to connect it with the muscular sense.... But our interest lies
with the faculty rather than its organic seat.... Something in you
absolutely _knows_ that result to be truer than any logic-chopping,
rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.”
Naturally, James H. Leuba, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr, takes
exception to such language on the part of James. Prof. Leuba has been
attempting--in his “Psychology of Religious Mysticism”--to prove that
holiness is a form of hysteria. He uses the old method of those who
would define red without taking account of redness. That is, he leaves
holiness out of the question, and then shows that the residue and
hysteria (whatever that may be) have much in common.
“It is fortunate for science and philosophy,” he says in a footnote
to page 293, “that this passage does not represent William James
completely. It expresses only one, or perhaps two, of the several moods
or attitudes of this gifted writer.”
This is quite true. The passage does not represent James entirely.
I know of no passage which does. But does saying so dispose of the
attitude? The reader must judge for himself whether he has any inner
conviction, or state, which will warrant him in saying he has it.
Well may Prof. Kantor ask, “Is it not the attempt to biologize human
phenomena which has resulted in handing over to novelists [to say
nothing of novelists’ brothers] the sole guardianship of the problems
of human behavior and human personality?”
And since we have now allowed novelists to get in, we may as well
listen to Stewart Edward White, who is not only a novelist but a
journalist to boot. And he complains that “it is the habit of science
to thrust in the background that which it is unable to weigh and
measure and understand, which is the same as saying that it is the
habit of science to be unscientific.” It is certainly the habit of Dr.
Watson. The hunting of big game seems to have given White most accurate
powers of observation. Lions have this advantage over fallacies--they
are able to kill off those who do not see them right and in time.
George A. Dorsey, whose “Why We Behave Like Human Beings” I shall
venture to take a shot at before I finish, attempts to come to Dr.
Watson’s rescue and to save emotion for behaviorism without admitting
any of its troublesome implications. So Dorsey tells us not to be
puzzled; that emotions are like any of the other circumstances which go
to make up a situation to which our mass of reactions must react. We
“feel” them, he adds. Now as Dr. Watson’s main contention is that we
do not feel them, the admission of feeling is like permitting a wooden
horse to be carried into the mechanistic Troy.
It may be argued (but not by behaviorists) that though Dorsey is not
talking good Watsonianism, he is at least talking sense. And of
course he is when he speaks of emotion as a feeling. But he is talking
nonsense when he claims that emotion is a factor like any other factor
in a situation. And for this reason. The other factors may be viewed
both objectively and subjectively, while if we attempt to objectify an
emotion--to drive it into the open--it ceases to exist. It becomes a
bundle of its own causes--autocoids, or what have you? Or of its own
effects--yowlings, scratchings, clenchings of fists, grittings of the
teeth, and other alterations in bodily positions, tensions, together
with such chemical changes as may accompany them.
The fact that certain secretions from the ductless glands keep pace
with certain emotions does not even prove that secretions cause
emotion. An emotion that can be felt may cause the secretions. Still
less does it prove that the secretion is the emotion. A scolding by
your grandmother may also give you an emotion. Does that prove that the
emotion was your grandmother? Emotion tends to release adrenin from the
adrenal apparatus, which in turn acts upon the liver’s surplus supply
of sugar. This sugar gets into the blood, and the increase of sugar in
the blood is therefore evidence that you have experienced an emotion.
Even if you want to say that what you felt was sugar, need you add that
the feeling _was_ sugar?
A cat, we will say, is sitting on the table. Can we also say that there
is an emotion sitting there beside the cat? An emotion belonging to
you or to me, and not to the cat? Let us suppose that the cat has just
upset a vase which you and I both prize. Behavioristically speaking,
our reflexes are similarly conditioned in regard to it. So we both are
grieved.
The cat exists subjectively within us (or at least within me) in the
form of a group of ideas of cat--or as Dr. Watson would insist, in
the form of certain squirmings of particles, members, atoms, and such
things. We seem to experience cat as a group of sensations of form,
color, of cat-movements, etc. But if I shut my eyes, put cat out of my
mind (i. e., shut off cat-stimuli from my receptors), I seem to cease
to feel or think or to be aware of cat. Then, from some remark you
make, I infer that you have kept your eyes open, and are still cat-wise
_en rapport_. So I infer that your awareness of cat (no matter what
“awareness” is) does not depend upon my awareness, or even upon your
awareness of my awareness. So I assume that the cat has an objective
existence, outside of us, and is a real cat. I assume also that the cat
itself is the cause of our awareness of it; and I feel certain that
while there may be as many awarenesses as there are people who are
aware, there is only one cat in the room.
There is also but one broken vase. And it, too, is the cause of our
being aware of it. Cat and vase are evidently of the same order of
things to the extent that they both have an existence within the
beholder (which the beholder knows through consciousness), and a
certain inferred existence of their own. But how about the emotion
awakened by the broken vase? Has that an existence independent of those
experiencing it?
Ever since the days of ancient Greece, and probably since long before,
certain philosophers have been trying to prove that not even the cat
has such an outside existence. Things exist only in the philosopher’s
mind, and therefore the one thing which exists is the philosopher. The
only way to refute this theory is by using your brains to an extent
sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that, since some of the things
you see look amazingly like yourself, and react much as you do to yet
other things, then it is at least highly probable that these other
people and other things actually are.
Now the behaviorist’s contention is merely the reverse of this
all-in-the-mind theory--and is equally absurd. To him there is nothing
in the mind; there is no mind. Instead of all being inside, all is
outside.
Yet Dr. Watson considers himself privileged to speak not only of
emotions and emotion-reflexes, but of “purpose,” “failure,” and
“success.” We begin with “random” squirms, he says, and now and then
one of these “random” squirms is “successful,” it accomplishes its
“object.” Unconscious “seeking motions” are continued until they are
“satisfied.” Such expressions are to be found scattered through all his
writings.
But a seeking motion must be a motion which seeks something. If the
babe be unconscious, how does it know when the seeking has been
successful? Does it move in hopes of finding pleasure or of avoiding
pain? It can feel neither pleasure nor pain. Does it squirm to improve
its general welfare? That is what the tropism theory assumes. But
without consciousness there can be no such thing as welfare. It makes
no slightest difference to the organism what happens to it, whether it
lives or dies.
Our unconscious Eliza refuses to cross the ice, even when bayed at
by an unconscious bloodhound. There is no reason why she should. An
unconscious Eliza would be as comfortable inside of a bloodhound as
anywhere else. And an unconscious bloodhound is as comfortable fasting
as when fed.
Nevertheless, Dr. Watson, who is “not concerned with problems of
consciousness,” is about to introduce us to language, morality and
reform!
4. TINKS! TINKS! KWAKS! KWAKS!
“Give me the baby,” Dr. Watson begs,[17] “and I’ll make it climb and
use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood.... I’ll make
it a thief, a gunman, or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in
any direction are almost endless. Even gross difference in anatomical
structure limit us far less than you may think.... Make him a
deaf-mute, and I will still build you a Helen Keller.... Men are built,
not born.”
Shall we indeed give Dr. Watson the baby? Not yet. If baby is as
plastic as he would have us suppose, the choice of a teacher carries
with it momentous consequences. You see, we don’t want him to make a
thief, a gunman, or even a dope-fiend. This is just an old-fashioned
prejudice, a hang-over from the days of consciousness. But we have it.
A Helen Keller, a carpenter or a good stone-mason will do very well.
We must, however, be reassured as to teacher’s intentions. He has, no
doubt, some high principle to guide him. Let him reveal it.
“The psychologist, having chosen human behavior as his material, feels
that he makes progress only as he can manipulate and control it.”[18]
Very good. But this is not quite the point.
“In this work there is involved not only ability to predict situation
from response, and the probable response given the situation, but the
experimental manipulation of stimulus and the creation of response....
Stimuli must be added to or subtracted from until appropriate response
is attained.”[19]
The method at least is plain. Baby is helpless protoplasm in the grip
of whatever situation he finds himself. Dr. Watson does not allow even
chance to interfere with those all-important initial synapses which,
once made, will turn conduct over to habit. Baby is a mechanism, with
no ability save that of wax to receive. His only “chance” is that
the situation shall be all that could be desired. Not even the word
“probable” placed before response promises any individual initiative,
since the psychologist proposes to predict (he clearly means “work back
to”) the situation of which any given response was the answer. One
wonders where the teacher’s initiative is to come from, whether he too
is the inevitable result of a chain of situations reaching back to the
beginning of time; and if so, where the first situation came from--to
say nothing of the first baby. But, which is more to the point, what
is the meaning of that word “appropriate” preceding “response”? What
makes a response “appropriate”? Obviously an appropriate situation. And
we cannot tell whether a situation is appropriate or not until we know
what response we wish to produce.
“Until we know more about the control of behavior during the tender
years of infancy, it seems almost a dangerous experiment to bring
up a child. The old argument that a good many millions of children
have been successfully reared in the past few millions of years has
just about broken down in the light of the now generally recognized
lack of success of most people in making satisfactory adjustments to
society.”[20]
What has also just about broken down is the argument that it is not
a dangerous experiment to bring up a child--for the reason that no
sane parent ever thought that it was not a dangerous experiment, quite
the most dangerous and gloriously all-important experiment which life
affords. If the child has no will or say in the matter, parenthood
involves a higher responsibility even than that which a man has for
his own soul--though of course the behaviorist will plead that he has
no soul to be responsible for, and that--but there is no use going
back again to the beginning of time. We shall have to give the teacher
not only a soul but a free will, _pro tempore_, or he will stick on
our hands just as Eliza stuck on the ice, and refuse to move. Things
are not moving very rapidly as it is. What, for instance, is meant by
“satisfactory adjustments”? Is there some doubt, after all, how baby
will adjust himself to what is happening around him? No, says Dr.
Watson.
“Without going too far beyond our facts [how far would be ‘too far’?]
it seems possible to say that the stimulus is always provided by the
environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man’s own
muscles and the secretions of his glands; finally, that response always
follows relatively immediately upon the presentation or incidence of
the stimulus.... These are really assumptions, but they seem to be
basal ones for psychology.”[21]
[Illustration: DR. JOHN B. WATSON
“Give me the baby”]
Since they are basal we will have to grant them, else we will be left
relatively immediately without any psychology at all. A satisfactory
adjustment, then, must be the usual and inevitable adjustment, but to
a satisfactory situation. Those children who were successfully reared
during the past few millions of years must have had satisfactory
situations to begin with. And it is “now generally recognized” that
they were exceptions, and not “most people.” There must be some
criterion, then, by which a satisfactory situation--that is, one
producing satisfactory response, or conduct--may be recognized. Has
Dr. Watson any such criterion to offer? No. He says on page twelve
of this same book, which gives us his “standpoint”: “Psychology is
not concerned with the goodness or badness of acts, or with their
successfulness, as judged by occupational or moral standards.”[22]
I am afraid, then, it will not be possible to let Dr. Watson have the
baby after all. Behaviorism has no ethics; no standard of conduct.
Yet behaviorists are preparing to build “infant laboratories,” and to
save children from “unscientific parents.” Dr. Watson, in particular,
calls upon us to make “systematic, long-sustained genetic studies
upon the human species, begun in infancy and continued until past
adolescence,”--an excellent idea. And he demands it because only thus
can we gain that “experimental control over human conduct so badly
needed both for general social control and for individual happiness.”
He has, then, ethical notions, though he nowhere explains how he came
by them. What are they? This question at least can be answered by
noting what sort of conditioning he wishes to give the reflexes. And of
these, love should be the most important.
“The original situation which calls out the observable love responses
seems to be the stroking or manipulation of some erogenous zone,
tickling, shaking, gentle rocking, patting and turning upon the stomach
across the attendant’s knee,” so psychology from the standpoint
of a behaviorist would have us believe. And sex emotions, however
understood, become later on the touch-offs of the gonads and of the
interstitial glands. How are these reflexes to be conditioned so as to
act in response to something besides tickling, shaking, gentle rocking,
patting and turning upon the stomach across the attendant’s knee? They
are not to be conditioned at all. The behaviorist wants to condition
fear and rage as much as possible, but he advises that love be left
where we find it soon after birth.
“In our opinion,” says Dr. Watson (still in this same book)
“conditioned love responses [i. e. responses awakened otherwise than
directly through the aforementioned zones], especially those directed
[towards] father and mother, breeding too great dependence upon parents
as they do, are probably the most sinister factors in the whole system
of human organization.” And he laments the fact that such conditioning
is not only tolerated by society, but actually encouraged by it. This
is a most melancholy philosophy, and seems to put masturbation above
marriage.
And what of the future? “The research psychologists in the
infant-behavior laboratories, once they are established, will in time
learn how to remove these conditioned emotional reactions.”
No doubt parents frequently do make their children too dependent. So
Dr. Watson advises that babies be hard-boiled; for the conditioning
which he objects to takes place, according to his own account, chiefly
during the second year.
A certain physician in a once-notorious book, entitled “_Les
Civilisées_,” insists that another of the characters, generally
considered much debauched, is entirely normal and healthy, “_parce
qu’il ne cherche pas les femmes que par le coït_.” Our leading
behaviorist is more civilized still, for he says:[23]
“In observing the two-year-old only child brought up by an unscientific
mother, we find that the child cries unless held in the lap of
the mother ... will sleep only when in bed with the mother....
Verbalization [speech] begins: it clusters around the mother just as
... manual and bodily activity clusters around the mother. In a similar
way the gut reactions have their center of reference in the mother.
Manual, verbal and emotional reactions are tied together by this one,
all-exciting stimulus,”--the mother, to wit.
Which means that the gut-reactions, or the stir of the unstriped
muscles along the intestinal tract, are what the child feels when it
loves its mother, or would be if it could feel anything; and that if
the mother be not scientific and careful, there is apt to ensue a
“conditioning” likely to depose the gut from its position of supremacy.
Unless the behaviorists can save us, our native, purely physical,
almost mechanical lust runs the danger of being swallowed up by
sentiment and affection.
This danger has been avoided in some parts of the world. Katherine
Mayo, whose book, “Mother India,” has received deserved attention,
says that the “whole pyramid of India’s woes, material and spiritual
poverty, sickness, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting the
subconscious conviction of inferiority which [the Hindu] forever bears
and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social
affronts,” is due to an excess of tumescence, to sex dominant and
rampant in Indian life. She is not speaking of the India of dreaming,
Vedantic philosophers, but of the real India of every-day life, which
she has studied at first hand. There sexual impulses, indulged in
upon a purely erogenous plane, are fostered and encouraged even by
religion--by the Kali belief; by the “phallic cult for females”; by
the training of girl babies so that they may become the playthings
of the carnal passions of men. I do not see where we could find a
better picture of what is likely to happen to us when Dr. Watson’s
“infant-behavior laboratories” once accomplish their task.
And now, having measured the loveliness of sex by the degree of
excitement existing in the erogenous zones, Dr. Watson offers us
another test for the excellence of conduct in general.
“In my opinion, one of the most important elements in the judging of
personality, character and ability is the history of the individual’s
yearly achievements. We can measure this objectively by the length
of time the individual stayed in his various positions--the yearly
increases he received in his earnings.... If the individual is a
writer, we should want to draw a curve of the prices he gets for his
stories year by year. If from our leading magazines he receives the
same average price per word for his stories at thirty that he received
at twenty-four, the chances are he is a hack writer and will never do
anything but that.”
Bertrand Russell (upon whose authority I take this quotation) has
tried to apply this criterion to “Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Milton and
Blake,” and confesses himself staggered by the result.
It seems strange that Dr. Watson should have selected excellence in
writing--even excellence marked in dollars--as an instance of a
workable, objective substitute for those old and by him discredited
subjectivities, right and wrong. “A word,” he says,[24] “is just an
explosive clutter of sound made by expelling the breath over the
tongue, teeth and lips whenever we get around [near to?] objects.” It
does not appear how the clutter can be much improved when we express it
in written symbols. In neither case does it mean anything.
“Meaning,” according to “Psychology from the Standpoint of a
Behaviorist,” “never arrives in the scientific observations of
behavior.... An animal or human being ‘means’ what he does.” That is,
he does not mean what he does. His doing is his meaning. If he makes a
clutter of sounds, that is all there is to it. “It is often said that
thinking somehow peculiarly reveals meaning. If we look upon thinking
as a form of action ... such speculations concerning meaning lose their
mystery and hence their charm.”[25]
“To answer what the church means to men,” he continues, “it is
necessary to look upon the church as a stimulus and find out what
reactions are called out, [and] why.... This might lead us into
folklore ... into the influence of parents upon children, causing
the race to project the father and mother into a heavenly state
hereafter ... finally into the realms of the incest-complex, homosexual
tendencies, and so on.”
I do not comprehend the “and so on.” It would seem that we had
already gone on about as far as we could go. This passage, unlike our
speculations concerning meaning in thinking, has not lost its mystery.
Its charm speaks for itself. But one thing is clear. Thinking is
speaking, and a word is an explosive clutter of sound.
Not always audible, however. Dr. Watson reduces the greater part of
our thought to what he terms “sub-vocal speech.” And Mr. Eggen agrees.
“We do not think with our brain ... we think with our muscles,” he
says.[26] The yokel, always suspected of thinking with his feet, thus
comes into his own.
“Thinking,” says the behaviorist,--and I now quote from David Wechsler,
“Psychology as a Practical Science in Modern Life,”[27]--“thinking
is but a sub-vocal speech--that is, it consists of certain muscular
movements of the throat and chest [like those observed in a
semi-literate man when he is attempting to read to himself] which are
not accompanied by the production of sounds.” _Id est_, they are not
_always_ accompanied by sounds, and some of them are observable only by
means of instruments. The child, we are told, begins by doing all his
thinking aloud--but some of us eventually learn to do it without noise.
Prof. Wechsler adds that the muscular theory of thinking is “not as
far-fetched as it seems.”
Why is it not? Because these sub-vocal movements seem always to
be going on when we are thinking, and to some minds--or should I
say muscles?--it seems logical to say that an accompaniment or a
consequence is a cause. The same sort of sub-vocal speech will lead us
to conclude that the foam in the wake of a steamer is what causes the
vessel to go. I have often noticed that a little troupe of dogs usually
accompanies Mrs. Belfeather in her walks in the park. I now learn that
these dogs _are_ Mrs. Belfeather.
That great psychologist, Eric Peters, once said to Chlorine Garnet,
“I uses my eyes to see with an’ my brains to think thoughts.”[28]
Evidently Peters is not a behaviorist. Neither was Shenute, who died
in the year 451, famous for his anti-pagan propaganda among the Copts
of Egypt. But he seems to have had some of our moderns in mind, for
he said: “They also make the sound of birds, having filled books,
for themselves and you, with vain words: Tinks! Tinks! Kwaks! Kwaks!
saying: We are making the sound of birds.”
“What possible good does it do,” demands Dr. Watson,[29] “when
discussing brick-laying or sub-vocal arithmetic to guess at what goes
on in the synapse, in the efferent or afferent leg of the reflex arc,
or in the muscle itself?” Such problems, he adds, “belong to the realm
of physiology, and this section of physiology has not yet been written.”
So he proceeds to write it, not as physiology, but as behaviorism.
These “Kwaks! Kwaks! Tinks! Tinks!” and explosive clutterings of ours
must be conditioned. And they begin to get conditioned the moment the
parents begin to pay some attention to them--which usually happens
without delay. Snoodlekins explodes, “Dada! Dada!” Paterfamilias is
brought into the presence. Wrong! The explosions continue. A watch is
displayed and dismembered. Wrong again! Then somebody hits upon the rag
doll in the corner. It fills the bill. Silence reigns, interrupted only
by goo-goos. And if the parents or other attendants did not afterwards
undo this conditioning by beating upon iron bars or what not, and so
insist upon the rising generation adapting its language to the usages
current among the old, “dada” would become the child’s word for doll.
This is a faithful translation into every day kwaks of what Dr. Watson
says in the more refined tinks of the scholar, and I do not wish for a
moment to deny that things happen much as he says they do.
But the point is, Snoodlekins discovers through the trial and error
method that explosive clutterings of sound will cause things to move
around the house. He finds that if he says “doll,” slaves will hurry to
place a doll in his hands. Does this not give the word a meaning, in
the meaningful sense of the term? Does it not imply will and purpose
upon the baby’s part; consciousness, likes, dislikes; the ability to
feel pain and pleasure; the desire to eschew the one and pursue the
other? And do we not by implication admit similar intelligence and
emotional capacity on the part of the parents and attendants? Otherwise
why should they care whether a yell or a coo assaulted their ears?
“Every time I question young children, or even college graduates,” Dr.
Watson complains,[30] “I am struck by their dumbness.” But surely they
are not as dumb as this. By dumb presumably he means unverbalized,
speechless. But of what use is speech to an unconscious, will-less
piece of protoplasm without a mind? Can the imagination of even
the least dumb among us see how or why a speech-mechanism has been
developed and an almost infinite number of reflex arcs conditioned to
respond to its innumerable demands if there be nobody anywhere in a
condition to know whether silence or bedlam reigns?
Dr. Watson objects to the evidence of “journalists” being received
upon any matter involving human conduct, because they always make
their depositions “in terms of some phases of the original nature of
man.” But nobody can say anything otherwise. A man born deaf could
understand Beethoven’s “Choral Symphony” in terms of acoustics, because
on that side he would not be “dumb.” But could he understand what it
is which the world prizes in the melody that lifts up Schiller’s “Ode
to Joy” in the last movement? And yet acoustics explains everything in
music--except the music. Trying to describe human conduct except in
terms of the nature of man is like trying to dip a net into the sea
without getting it wet.
“Consider for a moment what people mean, or at least should mean,
when they say they are conscious or have consciousness,” the “Myth”
proceeds. “They mean, in the words of the behaviorist, that they can
carry on some kind of brief sub-vocal talk with ‘themselves’ behind
the closed doors of the lips.” Do they, Dr. Watson? But what do you
mean, “mean”? Have you not told us that “meaning never arrives in the
scientific observations of behavior”? Have you not told us that we are
nothing but a mass of reactions? Can one reaction “mean” anything to
another reaction?
And why tell us that we “should” do this or that? You have given us
only our “life history” as the determiner of our acts. That history
found us with certain reflexes with which we had nothing to do; certain
“situations” arose to which we automatically responded; our reflexes
became “conditioned” in a way that we could neither help nor hinder. In
“Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” you say, “A host of
stimuli act concurrently, but the organism reacts now to one, now to
another, depending upon which group of stimuli becomes prepotent.” It
does not depend upon us, you see. The credit or the blame rests either
with our original protoplasm or with the stimuli which have made up its
life history. If slaves we were born, if in slavery we have grown up,
you cannot set us free and make us morally responsible now by letting
us talk a little sub-vocally to selves which do not exist.
Yet this is precisely what Dr. Watson attempts to do--or at least
he warns us how helpless we will be if we don’t learn to talk. The
old Chinese philosopher, Lao Tse, once said, “Those who do not know,
talk; those who know keep silence.” Dr. Watson says, going on with his
Myth of the Unconscious--calling it mythical because he prefers the
no-conscious: “The child brought up in isolation or among taciturn
parents or in groups where verbalization is frowned upon ... can
only act when brought face to face with objects in their appropriate
settings.” That is, he cannot think. “This is typical of the behavior
of animals. It is typical of the behavior of many primitive peoples; of
men like Jack Dempsey, Calvin Coolidge, or a great many athletes and
acrobats.”[31]
If the acrobatic, athletic, primitive, Dempsey-like Calvin Coolidge has
to be content not to think of consequences it is no great wonder that
we could not get Eliza logically and behavioristically across the ice.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] “Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology,” New York,
1914.
[5] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927.
[6] “The Training of Young Children,” _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1927.
[7] From Dr. Watson’s own account of these experiments in “Psychology
from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist.”
[8] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July,
1927.
[9] “Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology,” p. 1.
[10] Vol. XIII.
[11] September, 1926.
[12] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July,
1927.
[13] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 215.
[14] “The Unconscious,” p. 59.
[15] “The Metaphysics of the Instrument,” in _The Monist_, July, 1927.
[16] “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Lecture III, “The Reality of
the Unseen.”
[17] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July,
1927.
[18] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 7.
[19] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 8.
[20] _Ibid._, p. 8.
[21] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 10.
[22] _Ibid._, p. 8.
[23] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September,
1927.
[24] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September,
1927.
[25] _Op. cit._, p. 355.
[26] _Current History_ for September, 1926.
[27] _Ibid._, December, 1926.
[28] “The Trained Flea,” by Octavus Roy Cohen, _Saturday Evening Post_,
December 17, 1927.
[29] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 372.
[30] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September,
1927.
[31] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927, page 104, col. 2.