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160 that we have no effective means of doing any of this, we ourselves may experience a crisis of belief or a
loss of confidence, which can be corrected only by returning to a faith in man's inner capacities. This is
staple fare. Almost no one questions it. Yet there is nothing like it in modem physics or most of biology,
165 and that fact may well explain why a science and a technology of behavior have been so long delayed.
10. It is usually supposed that the «behavioristic» objection to ideas, feelings, traits of character, will,
170 and so on concerns the stuff of which they are said to be made. Certain stubborn questions about the nature
of mind have, of course, been debated for more than twenty-five hundred years and still go unanswered.
How, for example, can the mind move the body? As late as 1965 Karl Popper could put the question this
175 way: «What we want is to understand how such nonphysical things as purposes, deliberations, plans,
decisions, theories, tensions and values can play a part in bringing about physical changes in the physical
world». And, of course, we also want to know where these nonphysical things come from. To that question
the Greeks had a simple answer: from the gods....
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11. We cannot take that line today, and the commonest alternative is to appeal to antecedent physical
events. A person's genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of
185 the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest. For example, because of (physical) competition
during the course of evolution people now have (nonphysical) feelings of aggression which lead to
(physical) acts of hostility. Or, the (physical) punishment a small child receives when he engages in sex
190 play produces (nonphysical) feelings of anxiety which interfere with his (physical) sexual behavior as an
adult. The nonphysical stage obviously bridges long periods of time: aggression reaches back into millions
of years of evolutionary history, and anxiety acquired when one is a child survives into old age.
195 12. The problem of getting from one kind of stuff to another could be avoided if everything were either
mental or physical, and both these possibilities have been considered. Some philosophers have tried to stay
within the world of the mind, arguing that only immediate experience is real, and experimental psychology
200 began as an attempt to discover the mental laws which governed interactions among mental elements.
Contemporary «intraphysic» theories of psychotherapy tell us how one feeling leads to another (how
frustration breeds aggression, for example), how feelings interact, and how feelings which have been put
205 out of mind fight their way back in. The complimentary line — that the mental stage is really physical —
was taken, curiously enough, by Freud, who believed that physiology would eventually explain the
workings of the mental apparatus. In a similar vein, many physiological psychologists continue to talk
210 freely about states of mind, feelings, and so on, in the belief that it is only a matter of time before we shall
understand their physical nature.
13. The dimensions of the world of mind and the transition from one world to another do raise
215 embarrassing problems, but it is usually possible to ignore them, and this may be good strategy, for the
important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show.
Behavior is not recognized as a subject in its own right. In psychotherapy, for example, the disturbing
220 things a person does or says are almost always regarded merely as symptoms, and compared with the
fascinating dramas which are staged in the depths of the mind, behavior itself seems superficial indeed. In
linguistics and literature criticism of what a man says is almost always treated as the expression of ideas or
225 feelings. In political science, theology, and economics, behavior is usually regarded as the material from
which one infers attitudes, intentions, needs, and so on. For more than twenty five hundred years close
attention has been paid to mental life, but only recently has any effort been made to study human behavior
as something more than a mere by-product.
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14. The conditions of which behavior is a function are also neglected. The mental explanation brings
curiosity to an end. We see the effect in casual discourse. If we ask someone, «Why did you go to the
theater?» and he says, «Because I felt like going», we are apt to take his reply as a kind of explanation. It
235 would be much more to the point to know what has happened when he has gone to the theater in the past,
what he heard or read about the play he went to see, and what other things in his past or present
environments might have induced him to go (as opposed to doing something else), but we accept «I felt
240 like going» as a sort of summary of all this and are not likely to ask for details.
14.
The professional psychologist often stops at the same point. A long time ago William James
245 corrected a prevailing view of the relation between feelings and action by asserting, for example, that we