We are now in the presence of one of the most preposterous attempts at hocus-pocus ever recorded in the history of the human race. William James prepared the way by saying, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike,” etc. But with James there was always the possibility of assuming that an emotion is what we feel of the various motions involved. At worst it was but the natural order of things reversed. And in James, if one does not like his philosophy of the moment, the totally different philosophy of some other moment is never far to seek. But now that there is no such thing as consciousness, there would seem to be no way of feeling even a motion. Ergo, an emotion is merely motion. Squirms. The behaviorist asks for nothing else. Does he not? “An emotion,” says Dr. Watson,[13] “is an hereditary ‘action pattern’ involving profound changes of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but particularly of the glandular systems.” This is at least consistent. An emotion is a group of motions which have been somehow linked together into a pattern by reflex arcs before we were born. He then speaks of emotion as a raising of the “bodily tone,”--that is, a speeding up, an increase in the general average and celerity of motions. Still consistent, however absurd. But why did Albert, the eleven-months old infant of that wet-nurse at the Hopkins Laboratories, “turn sharply away” at the eighth experiment, when the rat alone was shown him? Because he had learned to associate rats with a loud noise of which he was afraid. But does not this imply that he _disliked_ the noise? By a wild stretch of the imagination, I think I can almost see what is in the behaviorist’s mind when he bids us believe that like and dislike can exist in a creature without consciousness. He means that there is no like or dislike about it; that what we call likes and dislikes are certain chemical changes which make us move either towards or away from objects. Tropisms, in short. I do not quite see how the mechanism for such phenomena could be arranged, but this may be merely because the mechanism of a tropism is too complicated for my comprehension. Likes and dislikes vary so much even when the same objects and the same people are involved. We are not simple in the way that a mariner’s compass is simple, its north pole always liking the south pole of a magnet, always disliking its fellow. Consciousness itself is a complicated matter. For instance, we are never directly conscious of it; we are only conscious of objects. Our inmost self can only contemplate that which is not our inmost self. The eye does not see the eye, though it can observe its reflection in a mirror.