Has the synapse? That depends upon what causes its resistance to vary. The association neurone itself cannot possibly be the will. The very fact that it is observable under the microscope proves that. The most hopeful field of inquiry, therefore, is that of the resistance which is offered the neural impulse on its way from one neurone to another. If this resistance varies--and it does--it is possible to conceive how the disturbances from the outside world may be sifted, some ignored and some allowed full play in the responses which follow. Here would be Psyche, locking and unlocking her doors. I do not say that this is exactly what happens. Our knowledge of the brain, though vastly more complete than it was ten years ago, is still far too fragmentary to permit of the localization of function to this extent. I am only offering a hypothesis to explain the workings of a belief arrived at in quite another fashion from the one we are following here. The synapse offers the least resistance in what used to be called the field of conscious attention; and by fancying that attention moved about from one brain-area to another without constraint and in conformity with some non-physical law, we used to, in the good old days, be able to picture free will in action--not with much pretense to accuracy of detail, but in a way which was at least intelligible. Physical scientists never liked this loose-footed field of attention. If it moved about, they wanted to know what moved it. Even if attention be only an area of super-“neutrition,” it could hardly move without force--a fact which some psychologists, desperately anxious to be free but having no force to put at the will’s disposal, have tried in vain to get around. But behaviorists will have nothing to do with conscious attention, free or bound. And as it was obviously necessary to find something to regulate synapsial resistance, they proceeded to find it. It was soon discovered that the neural impulse, having once traversed a particular route, found the way thereafter easier, just as we find it easier to walk through snow after somebody has broken a trail. Repeated synapses, therefore, may be left in charge of Habit. But there has to be a first time. Habit, itself, depends upon this first time for its own direction; for habit follows the line of least resistance which this very first time creates. And the first time, the time of times, which determines all other times by wearing the initial path through the cranial snow, is--behavioristically speaking--determined by Chance! What behaviorists wanted was to have nothing determine the first synapse, and not being mathematicians they fell into the error of supposing that chance was nothing, or the next thing to it. In reality they could not have made a worse selection. But, granting their premises, there was really nothing else to choose.