This theory is preferable to ordinary psychological theories in many ways. In the first place, it is not an attempt to treat memory as some sort of mystical “faculty”, and does not suppose that we are always remembering everything that we should remember if a suitable stimulus were applied. It is concerned with the causation of specific acts of remembering, these acts being all externally observable. I do not see any good reason to question it. Bergson’s contention that the recollection of a unique occurrence cannot be explained by habit is clearly fallacious. There are many instances, both with animals and with human beings, of a habit becoming firmly established through one experience. It is, therefore, quite possible that a stimulus associated with a previous occurrence should set going a train of bodily events which, in turn, produce words describing that occurrence. There is here, however, a difficulty. The memory of a past occurrence cannot be a _verbal_ habit, except when the occurrence has been frequently related. When Watson’s man on the street says “Do you remember the Midway”, he is not using words that have become habitual; very likely he never used these words before. He is using words which a verbal habit associates with an event that is now happening in him, and the event is called up by a habit associated with Mr. Sims. So at least we must suppose, if we accept Watson’s view. But this diminishes the plausibility and the verifiability of his view. It is not our actual language that can be regarded as habitual, but only what our words express. In repeating a poem we have learned by heart, the language is habitual, but not so when we recount a past incident in words we never used before. In this case, it is not the actual words that we repeat, but only their meaning. The habitual element, therefore, if it really accounts for the recollection, must not be sought in words. This is something of a difficulty in the Watsonian theory of language. When a rat learns a maze, it learns certain definite bodily movements; so do we when we learn by heart. But I may say to one person, “I met Mr. Jones in the train to-day”, and to another “Joseph was in the 9.35 this morning.” With the exception of the words “in the”, these two sentences have nothing verbally in common, yet they may relate the same fact, and I may use either indifferently when I recall the fact. Thus my recollection is certainly _not_ a definite verbal habit. Yet words are the only overt bodily movements by which I make known my recollections to other people. If the behaviourist tells me that my recollection is bodily habit, and begins by telling me that it is a _verbal_ habit, he can be driven by such instances to the admission that it must be some other kind of habit. If he says this, he is abandoning the region of observable fact, and taking refuge in hypothetical bodily movements invoked to save a theory. But these are hardly any better than “thoughts.”