| Summary: | "The eight essays forming Part One of the present collection are a frank attempt to show that mind is an "observable object." The attempt must speak for itself. I hope it is not lacking in a clearness and definiteness sufficient to seal its own fate. And yet, when these articles first appeared they enjoyed a unanimity of disapproval I can explain to myself only on the comforting assumption that I had made myself perfectly misunderstood. The thesis, "Mind is behavior," was new. So far as I know, it fell upon ears entirely unprepared for it by any previous suggestion that this might be the sense in which mind whosesoever mind was an object observable by all observers. The event might have been forecast: I was taken to identify mind with body. I was either an old-fashioned materialist or a new kind of madman. Since then, the interpretation of mind known as Behaviorism has become famous enough. I have no reason to think that these unobtrusive writings of mine inspired a single pen of those that later took up the cause of "mind as behavior." It is more probable that the position in which empiricism was left by its "classics" had grown simultaneously intolerable to a number of restless souls. And even if it were otherwise, I should be in little hurry to claim the honor of having fathered or furthered the doctrine that now goes by the name of "behaviorism." Whether with their good will or ill, the writers who have added the "ism" to my simple reference to behavior, have managed to fetter the behaviorist with the "mechanist" interpretation of mind. I shall be disappointed if I have not succeeded in making it clear that all the categories of life and mind are to my understanding of them teleological. As such, I would defend with the best their right to a place in the most "objective" science; but should be firm with the most "spiritual" in denying to mind the meaning of mechanism. To show the more living, the more spiritual objects of human interest and questioning to be such objects as can be approached by plain experimental methods is perhaps enough of an ambition. To have brought scattered studies so inspired into juxtaposition, that their import might be more readily grasped, their real faults separated out from their mere novelties of expression, all this sufficiently explains the first Part of the present collection. But Part Two has a larger ambition; one that I fear me is neither so easy of presentation nor yet so sympathetic when revealed. thought the second Part of this collection, through which runs this constant thought, might be called "Studies in Empirical Idealism." What obviously remains to be done in the way of giving to this thought clearer definition and more systematic expression will not, I hope, have to wait a too distant occasion. Meanwhile, I could not forego an opportunity to attract the helpful criticism of my colleagues by offering my reflections so far as they had progressed in more convenient form than such a sorry one as the scattered pages of periodicals come to"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)
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