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of two certified defectives to carry on the work of Jeans or Einstein.

But this is manifestly absurd. It is only the romantic doctrine of Rousseau and the believers in human perfectibility brought up to date. Because environment is important in making men of different sorts it does not follow that heredity is unimportant or less important. Pavlov gives no countenance to this extraordinary heresy. ‘The distinctive quality of the nervous tissue, the area of the grey matter, and the precision of the sense-organs, must all play their part in assisting or impeding the task of the educator.

We point this out as plainly as possible here. These really very wild exaggerations that Dr. Watson has imposed upon his otherwise valuable results have had a widespread diffusion, more especially in America, and they may be applied and are being applied very mischievously to condone the careless breeding of inferior and defective social types.

§ 2 The Mind as the Thing That Knows

In spite of the dogmatic prohibitions of the American school of Behaviourists we shall now begin to look inward. In what follows, the reader will find we are introducing a considerable amount of introspection. We shall call in the evidence of subjective impressions, evidence subject to many risks that objective observation escapes and evidence we can check only by comparison with what other people choose to tell us about their interior worlds. In the earlier Chapters of this Book we have studied behaviour as objectively as possible in relation to the developing brain. Now we are turning about, so to speak, and looking at the same activities from within. We are entering upon psychology properly so called, which Dr. Watson insists is no science at all.

It has to be admitted that so far as psychology has been purely introspective it has been a very barren and unprogressive study. It has associated itself with metaphysical and philosophical discussions. It has analysed and over-analysed mental processes ; it allowed itself to be brought into relation with the realities of hypnotism, of nervous physiology and mental disorder, only very reluctantly and protestingly. It is difficult to the point of impossibility to say where psychology ends and where physiology begins. What is the subject of psychology? Consciousness; the thing that knows and feels. Is it also the thing that

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thinks? The Behaviourist will say, No. Is it the thing that wills and sets outer impulses going? We are back again at the insoluble duality we discussed in Chapter 4.

The mind I possess, and into which I look, and which is, I gather from information and observation, not profoundly dissimilar to the minds of other people, presents itself to me as an active process of which, strangely enough, I can recall no beginning ; an active process which undergoes intermissions of which I am only subsequently aware, such as sleep, insensibility, and forgetfulness. By noting the development and action of other minds I conclude that my mind is the outcome of a process of synthesis, elaboration and, at last, remembrance, giving continuity to the transitory feelings and responses of myself as a baby, and that at the end of all its activities and intermissions comes a final intermission that, for all I know, may lengthen out into an endless cessation, death. That for other people may be the end of my mind, but manifestly my mind can never know of my final cessation. My mind thus viewed by itself is a very paradoxical thing indeed, without either a definite beginning or any end that I shall ever perceive, and yet with an effect of continuing process.

In its higher phases my mind is either apprehending vividly or thinking. Or it is giving a direction to a flow of will. I may be resolving to do something or actually doing it. To me all these processes have an immediacy and a simplicity that only the most elaborate analysis will persuade me is a false simplicity. I cannot at the same time perceive anything as what it is and simultaneously carry all its analysed factors in my Consciousness.

I sit at my dinner-table reflecting upon this section, and incidentally and almost heedlessly take and eat an orange. That seems to me a perfectly simple thing to do, but yet hear what an eminent modern psychologist, Professor McDougall, can find in it. He gives an analysis which shows how many elements, some conscious, some once conscious but now long forgotten, some entirely unconscious, enter into my mere perceiving of that orange. A Behaviourist might say that he gives a remote and shadowy description of the interplay of a vast concourse of nervous impulses which worked out to a resultant and pictured itself on my mind as the casual eating of an orange. But we are exploring now beyond the present boundaries of Behaviourist method.

*“ Now note,” writes Professor McDougall,