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



study of consciousness and the study of behavior, as means to 

 the progress of science. Watson seems to me to offer the right 

 criterion in power of prophecy. The proper criticism of the 

 analysis of conscious states and synthesis of supposed conscious 

 elements at which gifted followers of Wundt have busied them- 

 selves for a generation seems to be that these labors have so 

 seldom enabled us to prophecy what any animal, human or 

 other, would actually think or feel or do in even a dozen situ- 

 ations. Where we do find power of prophecy attained, we 

 commonly find that objective study of what the subjects of the 

 experiments have said or done has given it. The trouble seems 

 to be, not that pure psychics, or the inner life of a man as he 

 feels it, does not exist and give facts, but that it gives facts to 

 only one observer, and that, first, we get on much better by 

 using his testimony about these facts (which is, of course, his 

 behavior, verbal or otherwise) by the ordinary methods of 

 science than we do by leaving him to try to draw inferences 

 from it in some more direct way. In fact, he himself does as 

 well or better by. reporting the inspections of himself which he 

 makes without using his sense organs to himself by inner speech 

 and the like and using them thereafter as he would use the 

 reports of any other man. In the second place, these one-man, 

 unverifiable observations do not work as well in science as 

 observations made via sense organs which many of us can make 

 together and which we can repeat. 



Watson is probably right, also, in asserting that straight- 

 forward objective work has been more or less hampered by the 

 fashion in psychology of attempting always to say something 

 about some purely psychical fact. The protocols on the 

 conscious accompaniments of reaction-time experiments, dis- 

 criminations of sensory differences, and measurements of 'thres- 

 holds' of intensity, for example, it might be torture for Watson 

 to write, collect or read; and if his book relieves future Watsons 

 from being conscience-smitten at not contributing to knowledge 

 of how a frog feels to himself when he croaks or what the stream 

 of a rat's consciousness is as he scampers through the maze, 

 it will serve thereby a worthy end. 



In any case the spirit of psychology in America seems now 

 to be in a healthy condition in encouraging individuals each to 

 do the work he thinks best in the way that he thinks best, and 



