124 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



All this seemed very strange and radical to the 

 wide circle of readers to whom the early behaviorists 

 appealed, though much of it had been taken for 

 granted by biologists and psychologists, and much of 

 it has now become a part of psychological science. 



But the radical behaviorists went further than this, 

 and adopted other views by no means readily accepted 

 by later psychologists, such for instance as their in- 

 sistence that the human body is solely and exclusively 

 a response mechanism; their refusal to find in intro- 

 spection, even as experiential observation, an auxiliary 

 method of study; and their curious neglect of the mo- 

 tives of behavior, such as our deep instinctive striv- 

 ings, desires, appetites, wishes and impulses. 



Of peculiar difficulty to other psychologists was the 

 deliberate rejection of the word "consciousness" by 

 the radical group, only partly excused by the unhappy 

 history of the word in modern psychology, where it 

 has often been used merely as a substitute for the dis- 

 carded metaphysical "mind." Consciousness in the 

 sense of awareness is something which could not well 

 be omitted from discussion. The awareness of the 

 deer in the forest in the presence of danger might 

 have served as a point of departure for a naturalistic 

 explanation of the highly developed form which con- 

 sciousness takes in human beings and would have pre- 

 sented no inherent difficulty. 



Still more serious than these omissions was the 

 strong mechanistic interpretation which the radical 

 behaviorists gave to their theory of mind, extending 

 to a purely mechanistic world view. Some of them 

 even became propagandists for such a view, interpret- 

 ing the whole universe as "the totality of the electron- 



