But whatever love may be, the love-reflex, like the fear-reflex, the anger-reflex, or the unemotional motor-reflexes such as the knee-jerk, may be conditioned by having unnatural stimuli grafted on to their natural stimuli by bringing the natural and unnatural together in the field of their experience. Albert, for example, the eleven-months old infant of a wet-nurse in the Hopkins Laboratories, was not naturally afraid of rats, a rat being neither a sudden loss of support nor a big noise. He reached out for a rat as readily as he reached for anything else. But every time he reached, an operator standing out of sight beat heavily upon an iron bar. So the reflex arc, beginning with the ear and ending in such glands as distill cowardice or inhibit courage, grafted itself on to the reflex arc beginning with the rat-wave coming through the eye and terminating in the striped muscles that jerk the hand forward. And, as often happens, the grafter eventually won the day. “At the first experiment,” rat and noise being presented together, “the infant jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the mattress--he did not cry, however.” But “at the eighth experiment,” seven days later, when the rat alone was shown, “the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply away, so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before he reached the end of the table.”[7] Albert is now afraid of rats, there is no least doubt of that. You may throw your bang-bang instrument away, he will continue to recoil from rats. And not from rats only. The fear extends to furry animals of all sorts, to human hair, to cotton wool. In this instance it did not extend to the nurse, but sometimes it does. The fear stimulus is apt to graft itself on to whatever other stimuli happen to be operating. Thus are emotional reflexes conditioned--by a performance which has a remarkable resemblance to the old method of punishing a child for wrong-doing, except that wrong-doing on the child’s part is omitted as a necessary condition precedent. This is psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. From the standpoint of a psychologist it looks as if all trace of psychology had thus far been carefully left out; for psychology is the study of the psyche, the soul, of the conscious self, or that part of the self which has at least the capacity of becoming conscious. Dr. Watson says not. He thinks that psychology is the study of the reaction-mass. Anyway, he is convinced that reaction-mass psychology is all the psychology needed to explain everything. Mr. Mind may be missing, but he never will be missed. “The behaviorist asks for nothing to start with in building a human being but the squirmings everyone can see in the newborn infant.”[8] It is not asking for much, so we will now let him try. 2. AN UNDECIDED SYNAPSE