12 TITCHENER— " PSYCHOLOGY AS THE [April 3. 



haviorism would be equally within its logical rights in assuming that 

 all central processes may be transformed into peripheral: given Wat- 

 son's premises, they must be so transformed. But you cannot eat 

 your cake and have it too. You may bring up facts in support of 

 your choice of assumptions ; and you may show the scientific results 

 to which those assumptions lead; you may not, surely, offer these 

 results, even hypothetically, as facts in proof of your assumptions. 

 If we take up Miinsterberg's position, we find nothing but sensations 

 to work upon; but that is not evidence that Miinsterberg's position 

 is well-chosen. If we take up Watson's position, we find, perhaps, 

 laryngeal movements and changes in the state of the sex-organs ; but 

 that discovery gives no logical support to the principles of his be- 

 haviorism.^^ It is, indeed, obvious that, if the larynx and the sex- 

 organs prove refractory, the behavioristic equivalents of image and 

 affection must just be put — hypothetically, again — somewhere else; 

 and so on, and so forth ; for it is a logical consequence of the position 

 that somewhere on the periphery the required movements and 

 changes are to be discovered ; and the periphery is complex enough 

 to suggest any number of localizations. ^- 



31 1 do not deny that the empirical consequences of a particular theo- 

 retical attitude may serve materially to justify that attitude for its special day 

 and generation; men have often worked successfully for a time though the 

 logical foundations of their work were insecure. But the permanence of the 

 structure depends on the solidity of the foundations, and to shirk their inspec- 

 tion is only to make "more haste" for the sake of "less speed." 



32 The reduction of pleasantness-unpleasantness at large to sheer sex- 

 feehng is to me nothing else than nonsensical. But, like Watson, " I shall 

 not attempt to develop the point further at the present time." It is, however, 

 necessary to point out that the method of expression is not so ill bestead as 

 Watson declares it to be. In his latest tabulation (Arch. f. d. ges. Psych., 

 XXXI., 1914, 27iTf.), E. Leschke finds 90 per cent, of substantial agreement 

 in the investigations which he considers. The two principal sources of error 

 are a disregard of neurasthenia and of vasomotor anomahes and — an inade- 

 quate psychological training of experimenter and observer ! 



I may, perhaps, be expected to say a word on Watson's criticism of my 

 own doctrine of affection. The doctrine itself, I regret to say, he has not 

 understood. But he has also mistaken the motives which led me to adopt 

 it. My view that affection lacks the attribute of clearness is, he says, an 

 assumption " arrived at largely in the interest of obtaining a structural dif- 

 ferentiation between sensation and affection" {B, 426). As if a structural 

 system would not be greatly simplified and, as system, improved by the reduc- 



