342 BRAINS OF RATS AND MEN 



observation/' .... "Introspection is as behavioristic 

 a procedure as is watching a rat in a maze." On the 

 other hand, Lashley has reviewed critically the litera- 

 ture of introspection and, out of the mouths of the 

 introspectionists themselves, he has assembled an 

 astonishing array of evidence of the futility of these 

 historic attempts to analyze and explain conscious 

 experience. We admit that the phenomena of gravita- 

 tion are natural processes, though we have not yet 

 succeeded in analyzing them further and the explana- 

 tions which have been offered are as fantastic as are 

 the explanations of mind. 



McDougall (1923) says that it is roughly true that 

 all the psychologists who continue to make use of 

 introspection while accepting the mechanistic psy- 

 chology hold to the belief that our thinking or con- 

 sciousness is the epiphenomenon of the mechanical 

 processes of the brain. Possibly a statistical survey 

 would not bear this out; but at any rate the scientific 

 status of the group of psychologists to whom he re- 

 fers is not unlike that of some hypothetical cult of 

 physicists who accept all of the properties of matter 

 except gravitation but hold that this is an epiphe- 

 nomenon of no causal significance and hence negli- 

 gible in physical science though it may be treated in a 

 separate gravitational science in a non-physical realm. 



No abyss of ignorance of what consciousness really 

 is, no futilities of introspective analysis, no dialectic, 

 destroy the simple datum that I have conscious ex- 



