Can any one, I ask, ponder these conceptions and not admit that they contain in germ (and in actively flourishing germ) the substance of the questions most R cutely discussed in contemporary philosophy? If such be the case, then the statement that philosophy has no more connection with psychology than with any other science, expresses not a fact, but a revolution to be accomplished, a task to be undertaken. One has, I think, either to admit that his philosophizing is infected with psychology beyond all cure, or else challenge the prevailing conceptions about the province, scope, and procedure of psychology itself.
One who has already denied to himself the right to undertake in the name of philosophy the revision and reinterpretation of the work of a special science may well seem to be precluded from making any such challenge. In setting forth such a self-denying ordinance, I also made, however, the statement that a philosopher is within his scope when he looks in a science for survivals of past philosophies and reflects upon their worth in the light of subsequent advance in science and art. The right to undertakesuch. a critical revision can be queried only by those who measure the worth of a philosophical problem by the number of centuries in which it has been unsuccessfully discussed.
There is, then, at least prima-facie ground for holding that the orthodox psychological tradition has not arisen within the actual pursuit of specific inquiries into matters of fact, but within the philosophies of Locke and Descartes, modified perhaps in some regards by the philosophy of Kant. With all due respect to the scientific findings of any group of inquiries, I can not find it in my heart to extend this disposition of acquiescence to the first tentative escapes from medieval science. I have not the time or the disposition herewith to prove that the notion of psychic states immediately given, forming the sole incontrovertible basis of "knowledge,"---i. e., certainty-and having their own laws and systematizations, was bequeathed by seventeenth-century philosophy to psychology, instead of originating independently within psychology. That is another story, and yet a story whose materials are easily accessible to all. My present purpose is the more restricted one of pointing out that in so far as there are grounds for thinking that the traditional presuppositions of psychology were wished upon it by philosophy when it was as yet too immature to defend itself, a philosopher is within his own jurisdiction in submitting them to critical. examination.
The prospects for success in such a critical undertaking are increased, if I mistake not, by the present situation within the science of psychology as that is actually carried on. On the one hand, there are many developments (as in clinical psychology, in animal, educational, and social psychology) that decline to lend themselves to - the traditional rubrics; on the other hand, a certain discrepancy between the researches actually carried on by experimentalist,-, and the language in which alone it is supposed to be proper to formulate them is worrying an increasing number of psychologists, and is increasingly seeming to impose upon them the restrictions of an irritating and cumbersome artificiality. If one went over the full output of the laboratories of the last five years, how much of that output would seem to call, on its own behalf and in its own specific terms, for formulation in the Cartesian-Lockean terms? Supposing the slate were cleared of historic traditions, what would be the natural way of stating the object, method, and results of the inquiries? When psychologists themselves are breaking away, in at least a considerable portion of their undertakings, from exclusive preoccupation with their inherited apparatus, the philosopher is not called upon to assume the whole burden of piety.
As a specific illustration, one may point to the change that will cone over the spirit and tenor of philosophic discussion if the activities and methods of behaviorist psychologists grow at the expense of the introspectionist school. The change could hardly fail to be radical, as soon as there was a generation of teachers and students trained in the behaviorist point of view. It would be radical because the change effected would not be an affair of different ways of dealing with old problems, but of relegation of the problems to the attic in which are kept the relics of former intellectual bad taste.
Even a well-wisher (from the philosophic side), to the behaviorist movement must, however, express a certain fear and a certain hope. To suns them up in a single statement, it is possible to interpret the notion of "behavior" in a way that reflects interests and ideas that are appropriate only to the context of the type of psychology against which the behaviorist movement is professedly a protest. The limitation of behavior, for example, to the activities of the nervous system seems to me to express a by-product of the older problem of the relations of mind and body which, in turn, was an outcome of the notion of the mental (or psychical) as constituting a distinct realm of existence. Behavior, taken in its own terms and not as translated into the terms of some theoretical preconception, would seen to be as wide as the doings and sufferings of a human being. The distinction between routine and whimsical and intelligent---or aimful---behavior would seem to describe a genuine distinction in ways of behaving. To throw overboard "consciousness" as a realm of existences immediately given as private and open only to private inspection (or introspection) is one thing; to deny, on the basis of a behavior of the nervous system, the genuineness of the difference between conscious (or deliberate) behavior and impulsive and routine behavior is another thing. The obliteration of the, conscious in its adjectival sense (as a quality of some types -of response) because it is not discoverable by inspection of the operation of neurones or muscles seems to be the product, of ways of thinking congenial only to a separation of physical and purposive action. And this separation would surely not arise. if one began, with behavior, for the separation implies an ascription of independent existence to the mental, on the basis of which alone some acts may be termed purely physical.
There is certainly every reason to think that the behavior of the nervous system is an important element in human behavior; there is reason to think that it is the crucial element in the mechanism of human behavior. But unless we start with behavior as more than physical, as meaning the sum total of life-attitudes and responses of a living being, and take these attitudes and responses at their face value, we shall never be able to discover the existence and importance of the nervous system as the mechanism of behavior. There must be genuine functions of which it is the operative mechanism, if it is to be identified as a mechanism.
Perhaps one example will make clearer what I am driving at. The psychology of immediately given conscious existence was compelled to treat meanings as simply aggregates of elementary states of consciousness, whose existence and aggregation as conscious things are open to immediate introspection. The behaviorist, in reaction from the artificiality and inadequacy of such a view, looks for some fact of ostensible, overt movement, that may be identified with thought, i. e., meaning-functions. Quite naturally he fastens upon physical changes in the vocal apparatus. These movements open to objective detection and registration are what the other school had termed thought---consciousness as meanings, concepts, judgments, seasonings, or whatever. For my own part, I do not doubt that vocalization, including overt laryngeal changes, furnishes the mechanism of the greater part (possibly the whole) of thought-behavior. But to say that we can tell what speech or meaningful behavior is by examining this mechanism is putting the cart before the horse; the fact of speech behavior must be given as a primary fact before we can identify any particular set of structures as concerned in its exercise. The behavior standpoint means, unless it is sheared down in behalf of some unexpressed preconception, that, speech is just what men do when they communicate with others or with themselves.. Knowing the apparatus through which this doing is carried on, we doubtless know more about it than we should otherwise know; by this discovery we bring the doing under better control. But to say that physical movements, when the concrete empirical qualities of language are eliminated,are language is to begin by mutilating the facts. Exactly the same considerations apply to purposive behavior-that is, conscious behavior, the event from which "consciousness" is derived by making an adjective into