5 12 - 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



brought forward criteria of consciousness, 

 or of psychical levels that were either 

 logically satisfactory or of any genuine 

 value in the practical task of arranging 

 organisms in a mental scale. More 

 important still, no one had made a serious 

 attempt to reveal the subjective experience 

 of the animal mind in terms of the analyt- 

 ical concepts of human consciousness. 



In view of the evident failure of the 

 defenders of subjectivism in comparative 

 psychology to offer a constructive working 

 program, it does not seem strange that the 

 validity and usefulness of anthropo- 

 morphic analogy began to be attacked. 

 The vigorous and rapid extension of 

 experimental methods that marked the 

 turn of the century had the effect of 

 shifting the emphasis from speculation to 

 objective results. The experimentalists 

 became more and more interested in ob- 

 serving and reporting behavior and had 

 less time and inclination than formerly to 

 indulge in subjective speculation. They 

 were, indeed, often embarrassed by the 

 claim that their work was not genuinely 

 psychological insofar as they failed to 

 make a deliberate subjective interpretation 

 of their results. When the experimen- 

 talist did stop to theorize, he was likely 

 to do so in a more critical vein than 

 formerly. For example, Thorndike, on 

 the basis of his own studies, vigorously 

 attacked imitational and ideational types 

 of learning in higher vertebrates and 

 emphasized, even more than Morgan had 

 done, the trial and error factor. 



Even in the field of human psychology, 

 the older subjective concepts and the 

 introspective method were beginning to be 

 challenged. In 1904, James (148) led out 

 with his famous attack on the concept of 

 consciousness as an entity, and Cattell 

 (116) asserted the right of the psychol- 

 ogist to deal with purely objective 

 phases of human behavior without 



recourse to introspective or other subjec- 

 tive interpretation. Somewhat earlier 

 than this, Woodworth (Z46) had shown 

 the inadequacy of introspective analysis 

 in connection with his study of voluntary 

 movement. A decade later, Dunlap (114, 

 1x5) emphasized the shortcomings of 

 introspection and argued against the 

 current conception of the mental image. 

 In philosophy, the American wing of the 

 pragmatic movement, and more par- 

 ticularly the development of American 

 realism (Z44, 2.45), had led to a demand for 

 a reformulation of psychological concep- 

 tions, more in line with a functional, or 

 relational view of mind. In Russia, 

 Bekhterev (94) was contending for a 

 strictly objective human psychology al- 

 though not denying the existence of 

 mental states paralleling behavior, stress- 

 ing rather the irrelevancy of subjective 

 description. In spite of such occasional 

 evidences of revolt, however, human 

 psychology was still dominated by subjec- 

 tivism, as a survey of the opinions of 

 representative leaders will show (iz6, 

 zzz). 



Thus matters stood, when Watson, 

 beginning about 191Z, proposed that 

 psychology throw overboard the intro- 

 spective method and all subjective con- 

 cepts and limit its activities to the study 

 of objective factors in terms of stimulus- 

 response relationships. Watson denied 

 that the psychologist, as scientist, had any 

 right to recognize such philosophical 

 distinctions as mind-body, subjective- 

 objective, conscious -unconscious. To the 

 empirical observer there exists only the 

 organism as an object and its movements 

 or behavior in an environment. Such 

 subjective categories as sensation, emo- 

 tion, image, etc., as currently conceived, 

 are logical artefacts rather than psycholog- 

 ical entities or processes. Nothing of 

 the sort can be discovered by natural 



