“Consciousness ... is but an indefinable phrase.... Even if [objective proofs of consciousness] existed, they would exist as isolated, unmeasurable ‘mental curiosities.’... The behaviorist finds no evidence for ‘mental existences’ or ‘mental processes’ of any kind.... If behaviorism is ever to stand for anything ... it must make a clean break with the whole concept of consciousness.” Our thinking processes “are not different in essence from tennis-playing, swimming, or any other activity.... Meaning ... never arises in the scientific observation of behavior.” Thus far he goes in this one book. In a previous volume[4] he merely concluded that “one can assume either the presence or absence of consciousness ... without affecting the problems of behavior by one jot or one tittle.” But in “The Myth of the Unconscious”[5] he throws subterfuge to the winds and says plainly: “The behaviorist finds no ‘mind’ in his laboratories, sees it nowhere in his subjects ... if the behaviorists are right, then ... _there can be no such thing as consciousness_.” Why? Because “personality ... is the reaction-mass as a whole.” Can you put marbles in a bag and shake them till the mass of their reactions becomes aware of itself? Obviously not. Accepting for the sake of argument the definition of personality as it appears from the Watson “standpoint,”--there is no argument. Logic leads us straight into nothing. This is also the conclusion of J. S. Moore, who contends that _content_ when accented upon the first syllable signifies merely _context_--not the thing inside (there is no thing inside) but the things around it. Which makes it clear that I have been guilty of gross presumption in even trying to attach meaning to “psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist.” This may sound like an attempt to be funny, to make cheap humor out of random extracts from a book half or not at all understood, but whether I understand psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist or not, I was never more serious in my life. Not only Dr. Watson but many other adult men are solemnly asking us with perfectly straight faces if we dare to call not our souls but ourselves our own. And if we nod an affirmative, they smile in their beards, and imply that we must have lacked early advantages. But it will be urged it cannot be that so large a number of university professors have gone mad. They must have some way of deceiving themselves. And indeed they have. Metaphysics has been defined as the art of befuddling one’s self methodically, and of metaphysics of this sort none are so fond as those who decry metaphysics altogether. “Reaction-mass as a whole” sounds like a reasonable expression, does it not? Abstractions always do. And yet reactions can have no mass. They are only movements, not the things which move. Try and get any meat out of a movement and see what you have for dinner.