So he proceeds to write it, not as physiology, but as behaviorism. These “Kwaks! Kwaks! Tinks! Tinks!” and explosive clutterings of ours must be conditioned. And they begin to get conditioned the moment the parents begin to pay some attention to them--which usually happens without delay. Snoodlekins explodes, “Dada! Dada!” Paterfamilias is brought into the presence. Wrong! The explosions continue. A watch is displayed and dismembered. Wrong again! Then somebody hits upon the rag doll in the corner. It fills the bill. Silence reigns, interrupted only by goo-goos. And if the parents or other attendants did not afterwards undo this conditioning by beating upon iron bars or what not, and so insist upon the rising generation adapting its language to the usages current among the old, “dada” would become the child’s word for doll. This is a faithful translation into every day kwaks of what Dr. Watson says in the more refined tinks of the scholar, and I do not wish for a moment to deny that things happen much as he says they do. But the point is, Snoodlekins discovers through the trial and error method that explosive clutterings of sound will cause things to move around the house. He finds that if he says “doll,” slaves will hurry to place a doll in his hands. Does this not give the word a meaning, in the meaningful sense of the term? Does it not imply will and purpose upon the baby’s part; consciousness, likes, dislikes; the ability to feel pain and pleasure; the desire to eschew the one and pursue the other? And do we not by implication admit similar intelligence and emotional capacity on the part of the parents and attendants? Otherwise why should they care whether a yell or a coo assaulted their ears? “Every time I question young children, or even college graduates,” Dr. Watson complains,[30] “I am struck by their dumbness.” But surely they are not as dumb as this. By dumb presumably he means unverbalized, speechless. But of what use is speech to an unconscious, will-less piece of protoplasm without a mind? Can the imagination of even the least dumb among us see how or why a speech-mechanism has been developed and an almost infinite number of reflex arcs conditioned to respond to its innumerable demands if there be nobody anywhere in a condition to know whether silence or bedlam reigns?