I9I4.] BEHAVIORIST VIEWS IT." 7 



tions as those of the extensive attribute of auditory and the intensive 

 attribute of visual sensations, or the differences obtaining between 

 sensation and image, will be debated two hundred years hence as 

 inconclusively as they are debated today. Psychological method is 

 esoteric. It has proved unable to grapple with such matters as 

 imagination, judgment, reasoning, conception; these topics have 

 simply become threadbare with much handling. Functional psy- 

 chology is at fault no less than systematic and structural psychology. 

 Only those " branches of psychology which have already partially 

 withdrawn from the parent," and which are consequently less de- 

 pendent upon introspection, — experimental pedagogy, the psychology 

 of drugs, the psychology of advertising, legal psychology, the psy- 

 chology of tests, and psychopathology, — are vigorous growths. The 

 complete elimination of introspection from these disciplines will 

 make their results still more valuable, and will keep them — as psy- 

 chology itself emphatically is not — in touch with "problems which 

 vitally concern human interest."^^ 



That, I believe, is a fair statement of Watson's position ; it is 

 given largely in his own words. I have to reply, first, that fifty-odd 

 years is not necessarily a long period in the history of an experi- 

 mental science. It is not long, of course, regarded as mere dura- 

 tion : for it is in the sixteenth century that " the physicist abandons 

 scholastic speculation and begins to study nature in the language of 

 experiment,"^^ while it is only in the middle of the nineteenth that 

 psychology becomes experimental. It might be long, in a trans- 

 ferred sense, if it were crowded with workers : but the number o£ 

 productive students in " systematic, structural and functional " psy- 

 chology does not compare with the number in physics or chemistry .^"^ 

 Has Watson, I wonder, ever counted the number of experimental 

 papers that deal with imagination, judgment, reasoning and concep- 

 tion? It is notoriously difificult to trace beginnings; but we shall not 



18^, 163, 176; 165; 164; 163; 173 ff-; i6s; 169 f.; 170, 176. 



19 F. Cajori, " A History of Physics," 1899, 27. 



20 Mr. H. G. Bishop has kindly listed for me the experimental papers in 

 psychology, physics and chemistry recorded in the last five volumes of Fock's 

 Bibliographischer Monatsbericht. The ratio is approximately 1:9.5:44. Ac- 

 count is here taken of the psychological studies to be found under " Medizin," 

 as well as of those under " Philosophic und Psychologic." 



