GEORGE THOMAS WHITE PATRICK 123 



much as other psychologists, would be eager to study 

 them. 



Another Initial error, which we may notice here, is 

 the notion that behaviorism Is a passing theory, even 

 now neglected by psychologists of repute. The situa- 

 tion Is somewhat as follows: Behaviorism was popu- 

 larized in America by a small school of so-called rad- 

 ical behaviorlsts. Psychology owes these men a great 

 debt for their contribution to a new and scientific ap- 

 proach to the subject. They Insisted that psychology 

 is a natural science and that it deals like other sciences 

 with natural phenomena. The old notion that mind 

 and body belong to two mutually exclusive domains, 

 sometimes called the psychical and the material, still 

 persisted In popular belief, though psychologists had 

 long repudiated it. Many still thought that the soul 

 is some sort of psychic stuff, some kind of spiritual 

 entity, and that Ideas are things existing in the mind. 

 The early behaviorlsts were eminently successful in 

 further dispelling these beliefs, and in freeing psy- 

 chology from its metaphysical complications. They 

 spread abroad the view that all those processes which 

 we call mental, such as thinking, feeling, loving, hat- 

 ing, remembering, forgetting, are not "states" of some- 

 thing called "mind," but are different kinds of re- 

 sponses of a living organism, although these responses 

 may be overt or implicit, manual, vocal or visceral, 

 conditioned or unconditioned; and more important 

 still, they proclaimed a new method of studying all 

 mental processes through the objective study of be- 

 havior, thus putting psychology on a level with all the 

 other sciences of nature. 



