Dr. Watson objects to the evidence of “journalists” being received upon any matter involving human conduct, because they always make their depositions “in terms of some phases of the original nature of man.” But nobody can say anything otherwise. A man born deaf could understand Beethoven’s “Choral Symphony” in terms of acoustics, because on that side he would not be “dumb.” But could he understand what it is which the world prizes in the melody that lifts up Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the last movement? And yet acoustics explains everything in music--except the music. Trying to describe human conduct except in terms of the nature of man is like trying to dip a net into the sea without getting it wet. “Consider for a moment what people mean, or at least should mean, when they say they are conscious or have consciousness,” the “Myth” proceeds. “They mean, in the words of the behaviorist, that they can carry on some kind of brief sub-vocal talk with ‘themselves’ behind the closed doors of the lips.” Do they, Dr. Watson? But what do you mean, “mean”? Have you not told us that “meaning never arrives in the scientific observations of behavior”? Have you not told us that we are nothing but a mass of reactions? Can one reaction “mean” anything to another reaction? And why tell us that we “should” do this or that? You have given us only our “life history” as the determiner of our acts. That history found us with certain reflexes with which we had nothing to do; certain “situations” arose to which we automatically responded; our reflexes became “conditioned” in a way that we could neither help nor hinder. In “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” you say, “A host of stimuli act concurrently, but the organism reacts now to one, now to another, depending upon which group of stimuli becomes prepotent.” It does not depend upon us, you see. The credit or the blame rests either with our original protoplasm or with the stimuli which have made up its life history. If slaves we were born, if in slavery we have grown up, you cannot set us free and make us morally responsible now by letting us talk a little sub-vocally to selves which do not exist. Yet this is precisely what Dr. Watson attempts to do--or at least he warns us how helpless we will be if we don’t learn to talk. The old Chinese philosopher, Lao Tse, once said, “Those who do not know, talk; those who know keep silence.” Dr. Watson says, going on with his Myth of the Unconscious--calling it mythical because he prefers the no-conscious: “The child brought up in isolation or among taciturn parents or in groups where verbalization is frowned upon ... can only act when brought face to face with objects in their appropriate settings.” That is, he cannot think. “This is typical of the behavior of animals. It is typical of the behavior of many primitive peoples; of men like Jack Dempsey, Calvin Coolidge, or a great many athletes and acrobats.”[31]