The Study of Consciousness and Behavior 5 



reprinted in this volume produced in their author an in- 

 creased respect for psychology as the science of behavior, 

 a willingness to make psychology continuous with physi- 

 ology, and a surety that to study consciousness for the sake 

 of inferring what a man can or will do, is as proper as to 

 study behavior for the sake of inferring what conscious 

 states he can or will have. This essay will attempt to 

 defend these positions and to show further that psychology 

 may be, at least in part, as independent of introspection 

 as physics is. 



A psychologist who wishes to broaden the content of 

 the science to include all that biology includes under the 

 term 'behavior,' or all that common sense means by the 

 words 'intellect' and 'character,' has to meet certain 

 objections. The first is the indenniteness of this content. 



The indefiniteness is a fact, but is not in itself objection- 

 able. It is true that by an animal's behavior one means 

 the facts about the animal that are left over after geometry, 

 physics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology have taken 

 their toll, and that are not already well looked after by 

 sociology, economics, history, esthetics and other sciences 

 dealing with certain complex and specialized facts of be- 

 havior. It is true that the boundaries of psychology, 

 from physiology on the one hand, and from sociology, 

 economics and the like on the other, become dubious and 

 changeable. But this is in general a sign of a healthy 

 condition in a science. The pretense that there is an im- 

 passable cleft between physiology and psychology should 

 arouse suspicion that one or the other science is studying 

 words rather than realities. 



The same holds against the objection that, if psychology 

 is the science of behavior, it will be swallowed up by biol- 

 ogy. When a body of facts treated subjectively, vaguely 



