4 TITCHENER— " PSYCHOLOGY AS THE [April 3, 



Such, in outline, is "psychology as the behaviorist views it." 

 Watson, of course, goes into some amount of detail, offering illu- 

 stration and personal explanation, as well as attacking the method and 

 problems of current psychology. But before I follow him on these 

 various paths, I should like to record two general impressions that 

 the reading of bis articles has made upon me. The first impression 

 is that of their unhistorical character; and the second is that of their 

 logical irrelevance to psychology as psychology is ordinarily under- 

 stood. 



I call the articles unhistorical because they give no hint that any 

 similar revolt against an established psychology had taken place 

 earlier in psychological history. Yet one need go no farther back 

 than Comte to find a parallel. Comte's rejection of introspection 

 has often been referred to: let me now quote another passage in 

 which he sums up his attack upon ideology. 



" It is evident, first, that no function can be studied but with relation to 

 the organ that fulfils it or to the phenomena of its fulfilment; and, in the 

 second place, that the affective functions, and yet more the intellectual, exhibit 

 in respect of their fulfilment the peculiar characteristic that they cannot be 

 directly observed during the actual course of this fulfilment, but only in its 

 more or less immediate and more or less permanent results. There are then 

 only two different ways of studying scientifically such an order of functions : 

 we must either determine, with all attainable precision, the various organic 

 conditions on which they depend, — and this is the chief object of phreno- 

 logical physiology; or we must observe the consequence for conduct of intel- 

 lectual and moral acts, — and this belongs rather to natural history . . . ; these 

 two inseparable aspects of one and the same subject being, of course, always 

 so conceived that each may throw light on the other. Thus regarded, this 

 great study is seen to be inseparably connected on the one hand with the 

 whole ... of natural philosophy, and especially with the fundamental doc- 

 trines of biology; and, on the other hand, with the whole of scientific history, 

 of the animals as well as of man, and even of humanity. But when, by the 

 pretended method of psychology, we discard absolutely from our subject- 

 matter the consideration both of the agent and of the act [that is, of the 

 organ of function and of the result of its exercise], what more is there left 

 to occupy the mind than an unintelligible logomachy, in which merely nominal 

 entities are everywhere substituted for scientific phenomena . . .? The most 

 difficult study of all is thus placed at once in a state of complete isolation, 

 without any possible point of support in the simpler and more perfect sci- 

 ences, over which it is proposed, on the contrary, to give it sovereign rule 



