“Give me the baby,” Dr. Watson begs,[17] “and I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood.... I’ll make it a thief, a gunman, or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross difference in anatomical structure limit us far less than you may think.... Make him a deaf-mute, and I will still build you a Helen Keller.... Men are built, not born.” Shall we indeed give Dr. Watson the baby? Not yet. If baby is as plastic as he would have us suppose, the choice of a teacher carries with it momentous consequences. You see, we don’t want him to make a thief, a gunman, or even a dope-fiend. This is just an old-fashioned prejudice, a hang-over from the days of consciousness. But we have it. A Helen Keller, a carpenter or a good stone-mason will do very well. We must, however, be reassured as to teacher’s intentions. He has, no doubt, some high principle to guide him. Let him reveal it. “The psychologist, having chosen human behavior as his material, feels that he makes progress only as he can manipulate and control it.”[18] Very good. But this is not quite the point. “In this work there is involved not only ability to predict situation from response, and the probable response given the situation, but the experimental manipulation of stimulus and the creation of response.... Stimuli must be added to or subtracted from until appropriate response is attained.”[19] The method at least is plain. Baby is helpless protoplasm in the grip of whatever situation he finds himself. Dr. Watson does not allow even chance to interfere with those all-important initial synapses which, once made, will turn conduct over to habit. Baby is a mechanism, with no ability save that of wax to receive. His only “chance” is that the situation shall be all that could be desired. Not even the word “probable” placed before response promises any individual initiative, since the psychologist proposes to predict (he clearly means “work back to”) the situation of which any given response was the answer. One wonders where the teacher’s initiative is to come from, whether he too is the inevitable result of a chain of situations reaching back to the beginning of time; and if so, where the first situation came from--to say nothing of the first baby. But, which is more to the point, what is the meaning of that word “appropriate” preceding “response”? What makes a response “appropriate”? Obviously an appropriate situation. And we cannot tell whether a situation is appropriate or not until we know what response we wish to produce.