464 E. L. THORNDIKE AND C. J. HERRICK 



and the adequacy of frequency and recency to explain all the 

 dynamics of learning. These views will interest psychologists 

 even though they know or care little about the details of animal 

 activities. It is, of course, impossible to do justice to them 

 either in description or evaluation within the limits of these 

 pages. In the reviewer's opinion all of them are important, 

 but also, with one exception, are too extreme to be correct 

 as stated. 



Watson seems to me to neglect the facts that a human being 

 can observe himself not only as he observes another human 

 being but also by other avenues, and that this information 

 about oneself, got irrespective of sense-organs, may well play 

 some part in science. It is a minor part, but not necessarily 

 zero. That "there are no centrally initiated processes" seems 

 flatly false at its face-value, and, even when interpreted by a 

 conservative understanding of Watson's account of implicit 

 behavior — that is, of the procedure occurring in very long- 

 delayed reactions — seems to imply that all the hundreds of 

 millions of secondary circuits of associative neurones are doomed 

 to inactivity except when stimulated within a half-second or 

 so by sensory neurones. Perhaps I have misunderstood his 

 position on this point. The limitation of pleasure to stimuli 

 from the sex zones seems dubious in view of the apparently 

 closer attachment of pleasure to tastes and smells and its appar- 

 ent lack of any such rise and fall as the sex-zone sensitivities 

 show. The doctrine that the neurones stay the same struc- 

 turally from birth, or soon thereafter, is, I am aware, fashionable, 

 but it is speculative, and the opposite speculation — that the 

 terminal arborizations and collaterals of the neurones grow here 

 and dwindle there — seems to me more in accord with known 

 facts of growth, degeneration and regeneration. Theories of 

 behavior should not pin their faith to either theory. 



The doctrine that the 'successful' response is selected and 

 associated with the situation, not because of its success, but be- 

 cause it has been made as a response to that situation oftener 

 than any other one response, seems substantially identical with 

 the similar doctrine of Stevenson Smith. The argument holds, 

 as I have shown in discussing Stevenson Smith's presentation of 

 it, only if by original nature the 'successful' response has nearly 



