Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology

Abstract

BY the nature of its subject-matter, psychology has been more handicapped than any other science as regards both methods and aims. This is a truism which may qualify the following statement of Prof. Watson: “Psychology has failed signally during the fifty odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place-in the world as an undisputed natural science.” He is quite justified in saying that psychology “as it is generally thought of, has something esoteric in its methods. If you fail to reproduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your apparatus or the control of your stimuli, but it is due to the fact that your introspection is untrained, … If you can't observe 3—9 states of clearness in attention, your introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty. You are experiencing too much.” This kind of psychological method has been particularly exploited by the Germans. Again, the science has almost evaporated “in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content (e.g., im ageless thought, attitudes and Bewusstseinslage, etc.)”; a practical result is that the concept of sensation is “unusable, either for the purpose of analysis or that of synthesis.” Generally, the axiom that psychology is a study of the phenomena of consciousness has been thoroughly mischievous; no data have been accorded any importance except in so far as they throw light upon conscious states. Compromises have been attempted; a line has been tentatively drawn where “associative memory” in animals begins; consciousness has been assumed to commence where “reflex and instinctive activities fail properly to conserve the organism,” or “whenever we find the presence of diffuse activity which results in habit-formation, we are justified in assuming consciousness.” Not the least result of such pre-suppositions is the divorce of the study from practical human interests. Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. By Prof. J. B. Watson. Pp. xii + 439. (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1914.) Price 1.75 dollars.