GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

250
ETHICS
with living things, allow the possibility that some arbitrary
non-mechanical principle of life may at any moment
intrude itself to upset die causal chain of stimulus and
response which mechanist biology seeks to establish.
Thus it is no accident that field and laboratory workers
in biology are strongly mechanist in sympathy and out*
look
As with biology, so with psychology. In so far as science
is successful in bringing human beings within its scope,
its success depends upon its ability to treat them as highly
complex mechanisms whose workings are subject to the
same laws as those which are observed to hold in the rest
of the world, a world which it is the purpose of science to
describe. Of this world human beings are themselves a part,
and the laws which science reveals as governing the events
which occur in it must, if the scientific standpoint is to be
maintained, be exemplified in the lives flnd histories of
the men and women who are items of its contents. If we
cannot as yet show this exemplification in detail, that,
science insists, is only because of the lack of adequate
knowledge. Men, in other words, must be studied as
responding to stimuli, ainni the mtindi in so
far as its separate existence is conceded, must through the
speech and actions which are commonly said to spring
from it, be studied as objectively as the growth of a plant
or the movements of a planet Inevitably, then, Behaviourism
is the appropriate psychology for the scientist. "The
behaviourist," Bays Professor Watson, "puts the human
organism in front of him and says, What can it do? When
does it start to do these things? If it doesn't do these things
by reason of its original nature, what can it be taught to
do?"
Thus the human being is treated as a laboratory specimen
who is under observation. How, the behaviourist asks,
will a particular specimen behave when confronted with
a certain situation? and, conversely, when a specimen
behaves in a certain way, what is the object or situation
which causes it so to behave? These are strictly scientific