I would hate to be asked to analyze this book or to reduce its contents to an understandable outline. No matter what philosophy I attributed to it, I could be flatly contradicted by quotations from the book itself. Thus in one place he says, “Biologically, rape and the theft of a loaf of bread are natural behavior; celibacy and asceticism are crimes against nature.” And in another place he describes the courtship habits of various mammalia, showing that rape at least is by no means biologically natural even among the lower animals. The author is an eclectic, wandering freely through the pages of Darwin, Bergson, Dr. Watson and many others, picking and choosing what for the moment pleases his fancy, untroubled by the clashing of the various views which his staccato style records. Dorsey, though he says nothing new, constructs a curious puzzle of inconsistencies, but Dr. Watson, I think, is the key. He even says that Dr. Watson read the last two chapters prior to their publication, which sounds like a claim that the great behaviorist approved of them. It would seem that he did not read them very carefully. Nevertheless, though marked by the bar-sinister, “Why We Behave Like Human Beings” is clearly a Watsonian child. It begins, as do so many of our “thoughtful” books, with anatomy, physiology, biology, a long history of the lower forms of life, of the protozoa and the amœba and their kin, of the physical details of the human body, in embryo and out of it. The public thirst for facts of this sort is too great not to be taken advantage of by all who have psychological or philosophical axes to grind. And having posed his facts, and duly mixed them with alleged facts, he proceeds in the time-honored manner to attribute to his own inferences the authority due only to the facts themselves. He also makes large use of the custom of speaking of alleged “mechanisms” in metaphorical terms, personifying them and thus making them “go” with an energy which they are not supposed to possess. Thus he lends a vividness as of life to what is in reality a picture of death. And having denied God in substance, he does not forget now and then to fling Him a kind word. Man, we have been told, cannot by taking thought add a single cubit to his stature. Other creatures seem to be more fortunate, for we learn on page 66 that “some Primates experimented in fingers.” And on this same page “a lemur lost his second finger.” No, he did not advertise. He lost it on purpose, the way Freud lost the book his wife gave him when he was vexed at her. But in this case the object was to “give the thumb more grasping space.” And “some tried claws instead of nails.”