Bertrand Russell (upon whose authority I take this quotation) has tried to apply this criterion to “Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Milton and Blake,” and confesses himself staggered by the result. It seems strange that Dr. Watson should have selected excellence in writing--even excellence marked in dollars--as an instance of a workable, objective substitute for those old and by him discredited subjectivities, right and wrong. “A word,” he says,[24] “is just an explosive clutter of sound made by expelling the breath over the tongue, teeth and lips whenever we get around [near to?] objects.” It does not appear how the clutter can be much improved when we express it in written symbols. In neither case does it mean anything. “Meaning,” according to “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” “never arrives in the scientific observations of behavior.... An animal or human being ‘means’ what he does.” That is, he does not mean what he does. His doing is his meaning. If he makes a clutter of sounds, that is all there is to it. “It is often said that thinking somehow peculiarly reveals meaning. If we look upon thinking as a form of action ... such speculations concerning meaning lose their mystery and hence their charm.”[25] “To answer what the church means to men,” he continues, “it is necessary to look upon the church as a stimulus and find out what reactions are called out, [and] why.... This might lead us into folklore ... into the influence of parents upon children, causing the race to project the father and mother into a heavenly state hereafter ... finally into the realms of the incest-complex, homosexual tendencies, and so on.” I do not comprehend the “and so on.” It would seem that we had already gone on about as far as we could go. This passage, unlike our speculations concerning meaning in thinking, has not lost its mystery. Its charm speaks for itself. But one thing is clear. Thinking is speaking, and a word is an explosive clutter of sound. Not always audible, however. Dr. Watson reduces the greater part of our thought to what he terms “sub-vocal speech.” And Mr. Eggen agrees. “We do not think with our brain ... we think with our muscles,” he says.[26] The yokel, always suspected of thinking with his feet, thus comes into his own.