“Until we know more about the control of behavior during the tender years of infancy, it seems almost a dangerous experiment to bring up a child. The old argument that a good many millions of children have been successfully reared in the past few millions of years has just about broken down in the light of the now generally recognized lack of success of most people in making satisfactory adjustments to society.”[20] What has also just about broken down is the argument that it is not a dangerous experiment to bring up a child--for the reason that no sane parent ever thought that it was not a dangerous experiment, quite the most dangerous and gloriously all-important experiment which life affords. If the child has no will or say in the matter, parenthood involves a higher responsibility even than that which a man has for his own soul--though of course the behaviorist will plead that he has no soul to be responsible for, and that--but there is no use going back again to the beginning of time. We shall have to give the teacher not only a soul but a free will, _pro tempore_, or he will stick on our hands just as Eliza stuck on the ice, and refuse to move. Things are not moving very rapidly as it is. What, for instance, is meant by “satisfactory adjustments”? Is there some doubt, after all, how baby will adjust himself to what is happening around him? No, says Dr. Watson. “Without going too far beyond our facts [how far would be ‘too far’?] it seems possible to say that the stimulus is always provided by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man’s own muscles and the secretions of his glands; finally, that response always follows relatively immediately upon the presentation or incidence of the stimulus.... These are really assumptions, but they seem to be basal ones for psychology.”[21] [Illustration: DR. JOHN B. WATSON “Give me the baby”] Since they are basal we will have to grant them, else we will be left relatively immediately without any psychology at all. A satisfactory adjustment, then, must be the usual and inevitable adjustment, but to a satisfactory situation. Those children who were successfully reared during the past few millions of years must have had satisfactory situations to begin with. And it is “now generally recognized” that they were exceptions, and not “most people.” There must be some criterion, then, by which a satisfactory situation--that is, one producing satisfactory response, or conduct--may be recognized. Has Dr. Watson any such criterion to offer? No. He says on page twelve of this same book, which gives us his “standpoint”: “Psychology is not concerned with the goodness or badness of acts, or with their successfulness, as judged by occupational or moral standards.”[22]