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“The New Behaviorism is a feast of clear thinking and deep scholarship, one
deserving careful attention by students and scholars in any feld who are
curious about human behavior — and about why we understand ourselves so
poorly. Professor Staddon recasts some of the simplistic notions that launched
behavioral psychology in the early 1900s, challenging us to understand
behavior in all its glorious complexity while still avoiding the shoddy thinking
that has driven investigations of a ‘mental world’ for more than a century.”
Robert Epstein, American Institute for Behavioral Research and
Technology, USA
“B. F. Skinner returned to the public eye after tech companies began to
use his conditioning techniques to glue users, expectedly waiting for the
next Like, to their social networks. John Staddon ofers a deep look into
Skinner’s thinking, why he rejected freedom and dignity, how he made
pigeons superstitious, and why he believed that human behavior should be
controlled. The New Behaviorism provides a well-written and well-reasoned
analysis of the potential and limits of behaviourism, new and old. It is a
marvellous guide to understanding the uneasy relation between behaviorism
and the rest of psychology.”
Gerd Gigerenzer, Max Planck Institute for
Human Development, Berlin
“Behaviorism is a distinctive and elegant philosophy of social science, and

the source of many ideas that have entrenched themselves in psychology
and everyday conversation. There is no better account of the substance and
evolution of this movement than The New Behaviorism.”
Steven Pinker, Harvard University, USA
“The New Behaviorism is quite brilliant: It is frankly the only behaviorism

left standing. Staddon never fails to be thought provoking and there is a
wry assurance to his written voice which makes him excellent company for
the voyage he lays out. This is integrative psychological theorizing of the
highest order.”
Clive D. L. Wynne, Arizona State University, USA
“I started John Staddon’s book on behaviorism at a fast clip, as befts a reader

who has been a behaviorist for over 50 years. But quickly I slowed down
because the gems that were ofered were too rich to be passed over quickly. He
knows the history of behaviorism and the many notions in other disciplines
that afect its rationale. I've seen most books on the topic and this is, by far,
the best of all. Most pleasing to me, Staddon provides a path forward through
the recent travails of being an animal learning theorist. His presentation of
‘theoretical behaviorism’ provides a bulwark against many of the criticisms
leveled against our endeavors. I thank him for the education his book provides.
If you are a behaviorist, your reaction is likely to be the same as mine.”
Alan Silberberg, American University, USA
9 Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfra ncis.com
The New Behaviorism
This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along

with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy, and its
applications to social issues.
This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on
experimental methods as well as longer sections on the philosophy of
behaviorism. It ofers experimental and theoretical examples of a new
approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and
empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather lost its way.
The mission of the book is to defect experimental psychology from its
current philosophically unsound and methodologically rigid concern with
“mental life” toward the core of science, which is an economical description
of nature. The author argues that parsimony, the elementary philosophical
distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution,
and animal psychology—are all ignored by much contemporary cognitive
psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically
questionable cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical
behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as “consciousness” that
have been either ignored, evaded, or muddled by existing approaches.
This new behaviorism provides a unifed framework for the science of
behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical
issues such as law and punishment, the health care system, and teaching.
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of

Biology and Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Duke University, USA. He is the
author of more than 200 research papers and fve books. His research is on
the evolution and mechanisms of learning in humans and animals and the
history and philosophy of psychology, economics, and biology.
9 Taylor & Francis
The New Behaviorism
Foundations of Behavioral Science
Third Edition
John Staddon
Third edition published 2021
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 John Staddon
The right of John Staddon to be identifed as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Psychology Press 2001
Second edition published by Psychology Press 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Staddon, J. E. R., author.
Title: The new behaviorism : foundations of behavioral science / John Staddon.
Description: Third edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This ground-breaking book
presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical
behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues. This third edition
is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well
as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It ofers experimental and
theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an
alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather
lost its way. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology
away from its current undisciplined indulgence in “mental life” toward the core
of science, which is an economical description of nature. The author argues that
parsimony - the elementary philosophical distinction between private and public
events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology are all ignored by much
contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well
as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new
theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as “consciousness”
that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This
new behaviorism provides a unifed framework for the science of behavior that
can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law
and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching”— Provided by publisher.
Identifers: LCCN 2020053775 (print) | LCCN 2020053776 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367745813 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367745806 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003158578 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Behaviorism (Psychology)
Classifcation: LCC BF199 .S76 2021 (print) | LCC BF199 (ebook) |
DDC 150.19/43—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053775
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053776
ISBN: 978-0-367-74581-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-74580-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15857-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To DB
9 Taylor & Francis
Contents
Preface to the Third Edition xi

Acknowledgments xiii
PART I
History 1
1 The Psychology of the “Other One” 3

2 Neo-Behaviorism and Learning Psychology 17
3 The Experimental Analysis of Behavior 41
PART II
Explanation 53
4 Behaviorist Theory 55
5 Radical Theory 74
6 Variation and Selection 87
7 Behavior–Evolution Parallels 108
8 Experimental Methods 117
9 What Is Rational? 134
10 Philosophy of Behaviorism 147
11 Free Will, Behaviorism, and Utopia 161
12 Values 176
13 Behaviorism and Mental Life 185
x Contents
14 Cognitivism and the New Behaviorism 191
15 The New Behaviorism 209
16 Internal States: The Logic of Historical Systems 219
17 Consciousness and Behaviorism 233
18 Three Domains 240
PART III
Behaviorism and Society 257
19 Law, Punishment, and Behaviorism 259

20 The Contingencies of Medicine 279
21 Teaching 293
Postscript: Alchemy of the Mind 302
Index 305
Preface to the Third Edition
The New Behaviorism describes a philosophical and empirical foundation for

scientifc psychology. I begin with the single-subject experimental method
pioneered in the study of operant conditioning by B. F. Skinner and his stu
dents and colleagues. The theoretical starting point is a stimulus–response
unit, a habit. This unit is not a stimulus–response link, as in earlier behavior
isms, but a state of the system/organism. The idea of state, or any other type
of intervening variable, was explicitly rejected by Skinner’s radical behavior
ism. But it is an unavoidable part of any scientifc account, simply because it
is part of the logic of historical systems, as I explain in Chapter 16.
Radical behaviorism was spectacularly successful empirically, but its failure
to develop any theory that might include hypotheticals, things that that can
not be directly measured, prevented it from dealing adequately with many
aspects of learning and memory. The present volume describes a compre
hensive, theoretical behaviorism that can embrace all of scientifc psychology.
The paradigm for learning is Darwinian. The idea of state corresponds
empirically to the repertoire of behavior available to the organism in a given
stimulus situation at a given time. Reward and punishment select the active
response from this repertoire. Learning is the result of the combined efects
of behavioral variation (the repertoire) and selection (reinforcement).
We know much about reward (reinforcement), but too little about the
sources of the repertoire—selection has been emphasized over variation.
One aim of this book is to shed some light on the way that repertoires
develop (processes of variation) to rectify a long history when behaviorism
was devoted almost exclusively to selection.
B. F. Skinner is still prominent in this edition, for three reasons: frst,
because the new behaviorism is in many respects an expansion of radical
behaviorism; second, because B. F. Skinner is uniquely identifed with the
single-subject experimental method that has revealed so much about the
action of reward and punishment; and, fnally, because Skinner speculated
very publicly about how society should be organized and by whom it should
be governed. The aftershocks of his speculations, in the form of behavioral
economics and many established educational practices, are still rumbling.
They deserve to be examined.
xii Preface to the Third Edition
This edition is in three parts. Part I is a brief history of behaviorism up
until the apogee of Skinner’s infuence in the 1960s.
Part II deals with explanation, the ways that behaviorism has ventured
beyond raw data and experimental examples: frst, “laws” (Chapter 4); sec
ond, dynamic approaches (Chapter 6); and, fnally, the ubiquitous Darwin
ian selection–variation metaphor. This section also discusses the primacy of
the single-subject experimental method (Chapter, 8) and the philosophy of
behaviorism (epistemology in Chapter 10, free will and its discontents in
Chapter 11, values in Chapter 12, and the three epistemic domains in Chap
ter 18) and describes examples of testable theoretical models (Chapters 4, 6,
15, 16, 18). Chapters 13 and 17 discuss how theoretical behaviorism deals
with experimental and philosophical issues relating to consciousness.
Part III deals in a very broad-brush way with three societal topics from
which behaviorism can learn and to which it might make a contribution:
law and justice, medical training, and teaching.
John Staddon
Durham, North Carolina, November 2020
Acknowledgments
Many people were kind enough to comment on chapters and on talks I have
given on some of the topics of the book. I thank in particular John Malone,
Nancy Innis, Jennifer Higa, Max Hocutt, Kent Berridge, Geofrey Hall,
Eugene Moss, and Peter Killeen. I thank the late Peter Harzem for the
long Pavlov quotation in Chapter 18 and for detailed comments on the
draft of the frst edition. I am especially grateful to Armando Machado (for
the frst edition) and Jérémie Jozefowiez (for the frst two editions), whose
thoughtful comments made me think very hard about many tricky points.
I thank the fve commentators on the frst edition in the July 2004 issue of
the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and two friends, Charles
Hosler and Ralph Heinz, who read and commented on the book. I also
thank Sheri Sipka for her meticulous, efcient, and thoughtful editorial
help. I gratefully acknowledge research support from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National
Science Foundation. Without the long-term support provided by a Senior
Research Scientist Award from National Institute of Mental Health, and
Duke University’s willingness to cooperate by relieving me of most teaching
and administrative responsibilities, this work could never have been under
taken. I thank Jack Marr, Clive Wynne, and Howard Rachlin for very help
ful comments on the second edition; and especial thanks to Alan Silberberg
for a very careful reading of the manuscript of this edition. I am grateful for
many years of informative discussion of several of the topics in the book
with Kevin Hoover, Bruce Caldwell, and other members of the History of
Political Economy center at Duke. Of course, all errors and misjudgments
are entirely my responsibility.
9 Taylor & Francis
Part I
History
9 Taylor & Francis
1 The Psychology of the
“Other One”
Behaviorism was once a dominant force in American psychology. It led to

great advances in our understanding of reward and punishment, especially
in animals. It drove vigorous movements in education, therapy, and social
policy; it is still a force as applied behavior analysis, and many of its ideas
have been absorbed into cognitive psychology. Writing on the centennial
of behaviorist icon B. F. Skinner’s birth, a leading cognitive psycholo
gist put it this way: “Behaviorism is alive and I am a behaviorist.”1 But
as a separate entity, behaviorism is much diminished within psychology.
I explore the reasons and propose an enlarged version of behaviorism in
the rest of this book.
I look frst at where behaviorism came from, how it dominated psychol
ogy during the early part of the twentieth century, and how philosophical
faws and an unexamined ideology in the original formulation prevented
its advance—and left psychology and neuroscience prey to covert mental-
ism and naïve reductionism. I describe a new template for psychology that
is behaviorist in spirit but also respects the logic of historical systems laid
out by computer science pioneers like John McCarthy and Marvin Min
sky. I believe this theoretical behaviorism can provide a basis for scientifc
psychology. With a clearer philosophical base and proper empirical rigor,
perhaps it can help restore coherence to a psychology that has lost its
moorings and fnds itself adrift in a sea of inconclusive or uninterpretable
research. With a clearer view of what is possible, what is true and what is
not, what is testable theory and what is not, what can be measured and
what cannot, perhaps psychology can move again in the direction of real
science.
Psychology has always had its critics. But at a time when it occupies
a substantial and secure place in university curricula, when the opinions
of psychologists carry political weight, and when the numbers of research
papers in psychology have reached the hundreds of thousands, the number
of critics has not diminished, nor have their arguments been successfully
refuted.2 The emperor is if not unclothed, at least sufering a wardrobe mal
function. More on these problems in Chapter 8.
4 History
Psychologies
Many eminent psychologists, beginning with philosopher and proto
psychologist William James (Figure 1.1), have tried to sort out the divisions
within psychology. James’s suggestion, before the advent of behaviorism, was
to divide psychologists into “tough-” and “tender-minded.” He would have
called behaviorists tough-minded and many cognitive, clinical, and person
ality psychologists tender-minded. James might also have mentioned the
division between practice (clinical psychology, behavior analysis) and basic
research (experimental psychology), between “social-science” and “natural-
science,” or between “structural” and “functional” approaches—not to men
tion the split between mentalists and realists.3 But the main division is still
between those who think mind is the proper subject for psychology and
those who choose behavior. There is also some contention about exactly
what should be meant by behavior, as we will see.
The nineteenth-century ancestor of the mentalists is Gustav Fechner
(1801–1887), the “father” of psychophysics. Fechner was the co-discoverer
Figure 1.1 William James (1842–1910), philosopher, pioneer psychologist, and promoter
of the philosophy of pragmatism, at Harvard during the late 1890s. There were
two James brothers. One wrote delicate convoluted prose; the writing of the
other was vivid and direct. Surprisingly, it was the psychologist, William, who
was the easier writer.
The Psychology of the “Other One” 5
of the Weber–Fechner law, which relates the variability of a sensory judg
ment to the magnitude of the physical stimulus4 (Box 1.1). Weber–Fechner
is one of the few real laws in psychology. For very many sensory dimensions,
variability of judgment, measured as standard deviation or “just-noticeable
diference” (JND), is proportional to the mean. For example, suppose that
someone is able to correctly detect that weights of 100 g and 105 g are dif
ferent just 50% of the time—so the JND is 5%, then the Weber–Fechner
relation says that he will also be able to tell the diference between 1,000 g
and 1,050 g just 50% of the time.
Box 1.1 Weber-Fechner and Expected Utility
The Weber–Fechner Law

The negatively accelerated logarithmic curve (y = klog x, 0 < k)
relates a physical measure of stimulus intensity to a hypothetical
measure of sensation. The basis for the y-axis (JNDs) is the experi
ments on discriminability that show, for example, that the stimulus
diference between 19 and 33 (ΔI) in the graph can be judged cor
rectly (i.e., 33 judged as higher than 19) 50% of the time (the JND)
and similarly for the diference between 33 and 57. Equal discrimi
nability is then equated to equal mental efect. Hence, successive
increments in the physical stimulus are judged to have smaller and
smaller mental efects.
6 History
Marginal Utility
A similar curve is used by economists in functional theories of eco
nomic behavior. The curve relates the amount of a good, something
like pizza, cash, or real estate, to the value it has for the owner, its
utility. The fact that the curve is negatively accelerated means that
constant increments in the good yield smaller and smaller amounts
of additional utility (the equivalent to ΔI in the Weber–Fechner law),
that is, diminishing marginal utility. Like the Weber–Fechner curve,
the curve is derived by inference from empirical results. Many (but
far from all!) equilibrium (stable) choice patterns in real markets can
be explained by assuming that people choose so as to equate marginal
utilities—as this usually maximizes their total utility. Given that mar
ginal utility is assumed to decline with amount, this assumption can
explain, for example, why someone who has much milk but no bread
will be willing to exchange some milk for some bread with someone
who likewise has a bread surplus. Diminishing marginal utility is one
way to explain why people, unlike koala bears, are omnivores rather
than single-foodies.
The Weber–Fechner relation is a matter of fact. But Fechner went beyond

fact to propose that there is a mental realm with concepts and measure
ments quite separate from biology and physics—hence his term for this new
domain: psychophysics. Many contemporary cognitive psychologists agree
with him.
On the other side are biological and physiological psychologists. Biologi
cal psychologists believe that the fact of Darwinian evolution means that the
behavior of people and nonhuman animals has common roots and must
therefore share important properties. Physiological psychologists—now
usually called neuroscientists—believe that because behavior depends on
the brain, and because the brain is made up of nerve cells, behavior can be
understood through the study of nerve cells and their interactions.
Behaviorism is in the middle of the mental–biological/physiological divi
sion, neither mentalistic nor, at its core, physiological.5 Behaviorism denies
mentalism but embraces evolutionary continuity. It also accepts the role of
the brain, but behaviorists are happy to leave its study to neuroscientists. As
we will see, behaviorists seek to make science at a diferent level, the level
of the whole organism.
Since its advent in the early part of the twentieth century, behaviorism
has been a reference point for doctrinal debates in psychology. Until rela
tively recently, most research papers in cognitive psychology were sure to
include a ritual paragraph of behaviorist-bashing—pointing out how this
or that version of behaviorism is completely unable to handle this or that
experimental fnding or property that “mind must possess.”6 Much cognitive
theory is perfectly behavioristic, but the “cognitive” banner is waved, never
theless. No cognitivist wants to be mistaken for a behaviorist!
Behaviorism has been on the retreat until very recently. In 1989, a leading
neo-behaviorist (see Chapter 2 for more on these distinctions) could write,
I have . . . used a parliamentary metaphor to characterize the confron

tation . . . between those who have taken a stimulus-response [S-R]
behavioristic approach and those who favor a cognitive approach . . .
and I like to point out that the S-R psychologists, who at one time
formed the government, are now in the loyal opposition . . .7
In a critical comment on English biologist J. S. Kennedy’s behavioristically

oriented book The New Anthropomorphism,8 one reviewer—a distinguished
biologist who usually knows better—assumed that behaviorism is dead:
If anthropomorphism produces results that are, in the normal manner of

science, valuable, it will be persisted with; if it does not, it will be aban
doned. It was, after all abandoned once before. The only danger . . . is
that scientists can be enduringly obstinate in their investigations of blind
alleys. Just think how long behaviourism lasted in psychology.9
As recently as 1999, a philosopher blessed with the gift of prophecy could

write “Not till the 1980s was it fnally proved beyond doubt that although a
clockwork toy [i.e., computer] may emulate a worm or do a fair imita
tion of an ant, it could never match a pig or a chimpanzee.”10 Evidently, all
those artifcial intelligence nerds toil in vain, and behavioristic attempts to
reduce human behavior to mechanical laws are foredoomed to failure. And,
of course, this particular critic wrote before an IBM computer beat the
champions at Jeopardy and DeepMind’s AlphaGo became GO world cham
pion!11 On the other hand, to be fair, computers aren’t, in fact, doing all
that well with worms and ants either (see comments on C. elegans later). But
computer-based models cannot yet be counted out as ways to explain and
understand animal behavior.
Behaviorism is frequently declared dead. But although services are held
regularly, the corpse keeps creeping out of the cofn. A naïve observer
might well conclude that vigorous attacks on an allegedly moribund move
ment are a sure sign that behaviorism is ready to resurrect.
Origins
What is behaviorism, and how did it begin? The word was made famous
by famboyant Johns Hopkins psychologist John Broadus Watson (1878–
1958). Watson, a South Carolina native, after a rambunctious teenagerdom,
8 History
was a prodigious academic success until he had problems with his love life.
Divorced in 1920 after his wife discovered he was having an afair with his
research assistant Rosalie Rayner (a scandalous event in those days), Wat
son was fred from Johns Hopkins. Plus ça change—not that anybody would
much notice nowadays, especially as Watson soon married Rosalie. The next
year he joined the large advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, at a much-
enhanced salary, where he very successfully followed the advertising version
of the Star Trek motto: boldly creating needs where none existed before.12
His success in this new feld was no accident. The major fgures in the softer
sciences have almost invariably been people with a gift for rhetoric, the art of
verbal persuasion. They may have other skills (e.g., Skinner was a wonderful
experimenter), but their ability to found schools usually owes at least as much
to their ability to persuade and organize as to their purely scientifc talents.
Watson’s impact on psychology began with a nineteen-page article in the
theoretical journal Psychological Review in 1913,13 although the basic idea had
been foating around for a decade or more.14 In the next few years, Watson
followed up with several books advocating behaviorism. He was reacting
against the doctrine of introspection, the idea that the basic data of psychol
ogy could be gathered from one’s own consciousness or reports of the con
sciousness of others. Émigré German behaviorist Max Meyer (1873–1967)
made this distinction between private and public events explicit in the title
of his introductory textbook Psychology of the Other One (1921).
The Unconscious
The idea that people have direct access to the causes of their own behavior
has been thoroughly discredited. Introspection, as it is called, is an unreliable
and imperfect guide. Take the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon. Everyone
has had the experience of being unable to recall the name of something or
someone that you “know you know.” The experience is quite frequent in
older people—that’s why old-folks groups often sport name tags, even if the
members are well known to one another. Usually, after a while, the sought
name comes to mind—the failure to recall is not permanent. But where
does it come from, and why? And how do you “know you know” (this is
called metacognition, about which more later). Introspection is no help in
fnding an answer to either question.
The great German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz
(1821–1894; Figure 1.2) pointed out many years ago that perception
itself is a process of unconscious inference, in the sense that the brain presents
to consciousness, not the visual image that the eyes see but an inferred
view of the world. A given image or succession of two-dimensional
images can always be interpreted in several ways, each consistent with
a diferent view of reality. The brain picks one, automatically, based on
probabilities set by personal and evolutionary history. I show later that this
view of the brain as a categorizer provides a simple alternative to mental
istic accounts of consciousness.
Figure 1.2 Herrmann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) German physicist, physician, and
philosopher. In psychology, he made contributions in vision and hearing,
in physics on optics and conservation of energy, and in the philosophy of
perception through his idea of “unconscious inference.”
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the inferential nature of perception

is the Ames Room.15 Viewed through a peephole (i.e., from a fxed point of
view), the individual in the room appears to be large or small depending on
where he is in the room. The perception is wrong of course. His size has not
changed. The reason he appears to grow as he moves from one side of the
room to the other is that the brain assumes the angles are all right angles and
the foor is level. Neither is true. But given these assumptions, the conclusion
that the man is growing follows inexorably. The inference happens uncon
sciously and automatically. Surprisingly, perhaps, this unconscious inference
seems to be largely learned. It’s not innate. People brought up in primitive
cultures where they are not daily exposed to fat foors and rectangular build
ings are not fooled by the related Muller–Lyer illusion,16 and there are reports
10 History
of a similar dependence for the Ames Room.17 I discuss a similar process in
connection with the color-phi phenomenon in Chapter 18.
The power of the un-introspectable, inaccessible unconscious is espe
cially striking in creative activities like mathematics. The Indian mathema
tician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920),18 a poor prodigy from southern
India who taught himself mathematics from an encyclopedia, is a par
ticularly dramatic example. Ramanujan’s mathematical imagination was
legendary. He was brought to England just before the First World War
after corresponding with G. H. Hardy, a well-known Cambridge math
ematician. But even Hardy had difculty understanding where Ramanujan
got his ideas. Ramanujan would come up with profound theorems but
had difculty proving them and could not say where his inspiration came
from (he often attributed it to Namagiri, his Hindu house goddess . . .).
Hardy wrote,
Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems
of complex multiplication, to orders unheard of, whose mastery of con
tinued fractions was, on the formal side at any rate, beyond that of any
mathematician in the world. . . . All his results, new or old, right or
wrong, had been arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition,
and induction of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent
account.19
Many less superstitious mathematicians report similar experiences. J. E.

Littlewood, a brilliant colleague of Hardy’s, wrote that “my pencil wrote
down” the solution to a particularly tough problem: “it happened as if my
subconscious knew the thing all the time.”20 Something of which the indi
vidual is completely unaware—something creative and vitally important—is
happening in the brains of these people.
Experiences like this are not restricted to mathematicians. Here is exam
ple of memory retrieval:
There was a moment on University Challenge [a UK TV quiz pro

gram] when the host . . . was asking about a President of the American
Confederacy. I buzzed, assuming that I knew the answer, but all I could
think of was “Richmond, Virginia,” which I knew was wrong. The
camera zoomed in, so I had to say something and when I opened my
mouth I heard “Jeferson Davis” come out, but at no point was I con
scious of that information before I spoke.
So wrote a British TV quiz contestant a few years ago.21

Finally, famously, but perhaps least interesting from a scientifc point of
view, is psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), whose vivid picture of the
unconscious is known to everyone. The mysterious forces of ego, id, and
superego battle to drive human action, according to Freud. Well, maybe.
Unconscious drives certainly exist. That they take the form of latter-day
Greek myth is less certain. What is certain is that people are often com
pletely unaware of their real motives (or, at least, the end which their actions
seem to favor). British scientist, novelist, and public fgure C. P. Snow
(1905–1980), for example, wrote that everyone has a “secret planner” that
guides actions toward a hidden end. Watson alluded to something similar
with his unconscious, “unfulflled wishes.” People often do not know why
they do what they do. More later, on the distinction between motive-based
(functional, teleological) explanations and causal explanations of behavior.
Astrophysicists now tell us that more than 80% of the matter in the uni
verse, so-called dark matter, cannot be observed. The unconscious is the dark
matter of psychology. Its processes are responsible for all creative activity and
most recollection. But it is hard to study, and we still know very little about
it. Introspection, once the standard tool for studying consciousness, turns
out to be both incomplete and unreliable.
But if not introspection, then what? The behaviorist solution is to look
at a person’s past history—what have they experienced and how have they
acted—as clues to future behavior. This also is often incomplete. But at least
it is a method that points us in the right direction. More on history and the
origins of novel behavior later in the book.
Watson was right to be skeptical of introspection as a source of infor
mation about the causes of behavior. Less happy was his idea of theory.
(Box 1.2)22 Notice that Watson expressed his theoretical goal as “the predic
tion and control of behavior.” Good theories do predict and often permit us
to control the world. But “prediction and control” is not the same as (theo
retical) understanding. You may be able to predict your spouse’s behavior
and even control it, but that doesn’t mean you have a theory about it. You
know he or she is likely to say this or that in a given situation, but you are
unlikely to know why or through what process; controlling something is not
the same thing as understanding it. The Chinese bred fancy goldfsh and dog
breeders many varieties of dog long before Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel
made the frst step to understanding genetics in 1865. Breeders knew that
“like breeds like” and not much else about the mechanism of heredity. But
this was good enough to create an astonishing variety of animals and plants
via artifcial selection. No theory required. Watson equated theory with
prediction and control, even though real scientifc theories are much more
than that. He burdened behaviorists with a cartoon version of “theory” that
has hobbled them ever since.
Box 1.2 Watson on Behaviorism
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experi

mental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction
12 History
and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its

methods, nor is the scientifc value of its data dependent upon
the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation
in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his eforts to get
a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line
between man and brute.
—John Broadus Watson (emphasis added)
Watson wanted his science to be objective. The idea of objectivity, defned

in terms of consensual agreement among external observers,23 was empha
sized most strongly by the Vienna Circle positivists but had its origins much
earlier and was very much in the air as Watson wrote his frst paper. Behav
iorism (for Watson) is the redefnition of psychology as the objective study
of behavior Unfortunately, he got a little carried away with the apparent
simplicity of this idea. He thought he understood much more than he did,
as did B. F. Skinner a few years later.
Behaviorists of nearly all varieties, early as well as contemporary, agree
on the following reasoning: psychology is a science, and because it is a
science, its data are public. Physicist John Ziman much later popularized
this idea and used it as a defnition of all science, which he called “public
knowledge.”24
Obviously, introspective feelings, ideas, visions, and images—what you
or I feel or see in our “mind’s eye”—are not public in Ziman’s sense. The
subjective aspects of consciousness, private events in B. F. Skinner’s termi
nology, therefore (according to Watson and Meyer), cannot be the subject
matter of a science. In a unique philosophical break, radical behaviorist
Skinner tried to make private events into public ones, as we’ll see later.
The public–private issue is still contentious. For example, British physicist
Brian Pippard—neither a behaviorist nor even a psychologist—wrote in the
leading scientifc weekly Nature,
All too rarely do I fnd colleagues who will assent to the proposition
(which I fnd irresistible) that the very ground-rules of science, its con
cern only for public knowledge, preclude its fnding an explanation
for my consciousness, the one phenomenon of which I am absolutely
certain.25
Since psychology was at one time defned as the study of conscious

ness, and since the so-called cognitive revolution has once more legitimized
speculation about mind, consciousness, and theories derived from intui
tions about consciousness, it is obvious why behaviorism is still a source of
controversy.
My consciousness (or yours) is revealed to others through speech, of
course. And my speech (as opposed to the meaning of my speech) is public.
Since Watson, behaviorists have been very happy to take language (renamed
“verbal behavior”) as one of their domains (more about consciousness in
Chapters 13–18).
So far, I have described little more than what has come to be known as
methodological behaviorism, with which most general experimental psychol
ogists would agree. But Watson went well beyond an insistence on third-
person objectivity to argue against any kind of theory that did not explicitly
refer to observables, either “real” observables or things like “covert responses”
that sound like observables, even though they cannot be measured directly.
Thus, thought, for Watson, was nothing but “covert speech” measurable,
perhaps, by imperceptible movements of the vocal cords. Other aspects of
consciousness were similarly reduced to muscular movements or the percep
tion of such movements. This emphasis drew the attention of experimenters
to hitherto unexpected physiological accompaniments of conscious experi
ence, such as rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep as a signal of dreaming, or
the direction of gaze as an indicator of the contents of thought.26 But it was
theoretically much less productive. Watson’s preoccupation with the sensa
tions of movement left a legacy of obsession with proprioception that was to
constrict behavioristic theorizing for several decades.
Watson is not generally credited with paying much attention to the
unconscious. Yet, in his early years, he was sympathetic even to Sigmund
Freud:
If the followers of the Freudian school of psychologists can be

believed . . . we are daily betraying the presence of unfulflled wishes.
Many of these wishes are of such a character that we ourselves cannot
put them into words.27
But his emphasis was on the motor system, “covert speech,” and so on. As
we will see in later chapters, the limitations of consciousness are amply bal
anced by the autonomy of the unconscious.
B. F. Skinner, the predominant behaviorist of the twentieth century, was
less preoccupied with proprioception. But he nevertheless claimed that psy
chological theory should not include any “explanation of an observed fact
which appeals to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level
of observation, described in diferent terms, and measured, if at all, in dif
ferent dimensions”28 a position from which he occasionally deviated, as we
will see. As it stands, it is an odd view, since it would exclude from science
atomic theory, quantum theory, and genetics. For example, the law of mul
tiple proportions, a good behavioristic observation from nineteenth-century
chemistry, is explainable by reference to atoms and molecules, which are
not directly observed. The breeding patterns of peas were explained by
Mendel as a refection of the random combination of discrete hereditary
14 History
particles—genes—unobserved at that time and for many decades thereafter.
Much of physics is still a quest for entities postulated by theory but hitherto
unobserved. The detection of the Higgs boson is just the most recent in a
series of such eforts. It is a testimony to Skinner’s rhetorical skill, and the
dedication of his followers, that he managed to get away with a scientifc
position that, in efect, separates psychology from the most developed of the
“hard” sciences.
***
Behaviorism was a reaction against introspection as a scientifc method.
Watson and those who followed him were correct in this. Introspection
sheds only a very dim light on the true causes of behavior. Inaccessible to
conscious thought is the vast “dark matter” of the unconscious, responsible
for recollection, creativity, not to mention that “secret planner” whose hid
den motives complement conscious motivation.
But behaviorism also went too far in its attempts to simplify psychology.
Watson’s claim that thought is nothing but covert speech and Skinner’s puz
zling objection to theoretical entities that cannot be directly observed have
hobbled the development of behaviorism and allowed the rest of psychology
to backslide slowly into mentalism—familiar and readily compatible with
“folk psychology” but rich in philosophical error and a scientifc dead-end.
Notes
1. Roediger, R. (2004) What happened to behaviorism? American Psychological Society
Observer, 17(3), March.
2. Dawes, R. M. (1994) House of cards: Psychology and psychotherapy built on myth. New
York: The Free Press; Horgan, J. (1999) The undiscovered mind. New York: The
Free Press. “Psychology as a scientifc discipline can be seen as wallowing, perhaps
slowly disintegrating,” writes one commentator (Branch, M. [2014] Malignant side
efects of null-hypothesis signifcance testing. Theory & Psychology, 24[2], 256–277),
noting the fssiparous state of the American Psychological Association, which, as
of 2013, had 59 almost-independent divisions. This Balkanization is mirrored in
introductory psychology textbooks. See also, https://quillette.com/2018/10/07/
the-devolution-of-social-science/, and Machado, A., Lourenço, O., & Silva, F. J.
(2000) Facts, concepts, and theories: The shape of psychology’s epistemic triangle.
Behavior and Philosophy, 28(1/2), Spring–Fall.
3. R. I. Watson came up with eighteen psychological slices and dices: Watson, R. I.
(1971) Prescriptions as operative in the history of psychology. Journal of the History
of the Behavioral Sciences, 7, 311–322. The number of subdivisions has undoubtedly
increased since then.
4. See, for example, Dehaene, S. (2003) The neural basis of the Weber-Fechner law:
A logarithmic mental number line. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(7), April, 145–147
and, for an account of how Weber–Fechner underlies S. S. Stevens’s power law,
see Staddon, J. E. R. (1978) Theory of behavioral power functions. Psychologi
cal Review, 85, 305–320. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/
10161/6003/Staddon1978.pdf?sequence=1.
5. See O’Donohue, W., & Kitchener, R. (Eds.) (1999) Handbook of behaviorism. New
York: Academic Press, for a collection of papers on the varieties of behaviorism.
6. For examples of this kind of debate, check out Fodor and Staddon: https://psycrit.
com/w/A_dialogue_between_Fodor_and_Staddon, and Staddon, J. E. R. (2004)
A call to arms. The Behavior Analyst, 27, 117–118.
7. Amsel, A. (1989) Behaviorism, neobehaviorism and cognitivism in learning theory.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, p. 1.
8. Kennedy, J. S. (1992) The new anthropomorphism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
9. Ridley, M. (1992) Animist debate. Nature, 359, 280.
10. Tudge, C. (1999) Chimps don’t talk, but they do cry. The New Statesman, August 2,
my italics.
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer). The “Watson” here refers to an
IBM pioneer, not J. B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism. AlphaGo—the Movie
describes the machine’s 4–1 win over reigning champ Lee Sedol in 2016.
12. See Todd, J. T., & Morris, E. K. (Eds.) (1994) Modern perspectives on John B. Watson
and classical behaviorism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, for an account of Watson’s
life and work. For an account of his advertising career, see Kreshel, J. P. (2013) John
B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The legitimation of “science” in advertising.
Journal of Advertising, 19(2), 49–59.
13. Watson, J. B. (1913) Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20,
158–177, p. 158. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/views.htm.
14. Mills, J. A. (1998) Control: A history of behavioral psychology. New York: New York
University Press.
15. Named after its inventor American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. and frst
built in 1934. There are many videos of Ames Rooms on the internet. Here is one
by famboyant psychologist Philip Zimbardo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
reload=9&v=hCV2Ba5wrcs.
16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion.
17. For a survey, see Gregory, R. L. (2005) The Medawar lecture 2001: Knowledge
for vision: Vision for knowledge. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360,
1231–1251.
18. An excellent biography is Kanigel, R. (1981) The man who knew infnity. New York:
Macmillan.
19. Kanigel, R. (1981) The man who knew infnity. New York: Macmillan, p. 216.
20. Kanigel, R. (1981) The man who knew infnity. New York: Macmillan, p. 288.
21. Haward, L. UCL Magazine, Autumn, 1999.
22. Watson, J. B. (1913) Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20,
158–177, p. 158.
23. Consensus is a fawed defnition of “objectivity” or “truth,” of course. The scien
tifc majority is sometimes wrong, as in their initial rejection of Alfred Wegener’s
theory of tectonic drift and (according to some critics) the allegiance of the major
ity to the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change; for example, Staddon,
J., & Morcombe, P. (2020) The case for carbon dioxide. Academic Questions, 33(2),
246–258. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12129-020-09871-0.
24. Ziman, J. (1968) Public knowledge: The social dimension of science. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
25. Pippard, B. (1992) Counsel of despair. Nature, 357, 29.
26. Here are Watson’s rather inconsistent comments on proprioception: “[The]
behaviorist . . . has never really held the view that thinking is merely the action of
language mechanisms.”
But then, in the next paragraph:
“A whole man thinks with his whole body in each and in every part. If he is
mutilated or if his organs are defective or lacking, he thinks with the remaining parts
left in his care: but surely he does everything else in exactly the same way. . . . [E]
veryone admits that [a tennis] player is using every cell in his body during the
16 History
game. Nevertheless if we sever a small group of muscles in his right arm his play
ing is reduced practically to that of a novice. This illustration serves us very well in
explaining why one emphasizes laryngeal processes in thinking. Surely we know
that the deaf and dumb use no such laryngeal processes, nor does the individual
whose larynx has been removed. Other bodily processes have to take on the func
tion of the larynx. Such functions are usually usurped by the fngers, hands, arms,
facial muscles, muscles of the head, etc. I have in another place emphasized the
extent to which fnger and hand movements are used by the deaf and dumb when
they are engaged in silent thinking. . . . It would be an easy experiment, but so far
as I know not hitherto tried, to bind the fngers and arms of such an individual and
then give him a problem in arithmetic, memorizing simple stanzas, and the like,
which have to be worked out without exteroceptive aid. It would be necessary
probably to tie down eye movements, were such a thing possible, and to restrain
even the head and intercostal muscles.” (Watson, J. B. [1920] Is thinking merely the
action of language mechanisms? British Journal of Psychology, 11, 87–104.)
27. Watson, J. B. (1916) The psychology of wish fulfllment. The Scientifc Monthly,
quoted in Malone, J. C. (2014) Did John B. Watson really “found” behaviorism?
The Behavior Analyst, 37(1). Malone makes a persuasive case for Watson’s early sym
pathy with Freud’s views on the unconscious.
28. Skinner, B. F. (2104/1953) Science and Human Behavior, p. 193. The B. F. Skinner
Foundation and The Free Press.
2 Neo-Behaviorism and
Learning Psychology
Cognitive psychologists are interested in thought, but behaviorists are con

cerned with action—and not just observing action but controlling it as well.
The behaviorist emphasis on changing behavior meant that behaviorism,
as an approach to psychology, was almost coextensive with the psychologi
cal study of learning, particularly learning in animals, for its frst 50 years or
so. A history of behaviorism features many of the same stars as a history of
learning psychology.1
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

The budding behaviorist movement was strongly infuenced by the studies
of conditioned refexes by the Russian physiologists Pavlov, Bekhterev, and
their associates at the turn of the twentieth century. Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–
1936) was a gastric physiologist. Beginning in 1895, he ran a large institute
in the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg for several decades, well
into the Soviet era. In 1904, Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his contributions
to gastric physiology, but he is, of course, much better known for his work
on what he called “psychic secretions”—the salivation of dogs in response to
a bell, a tone, or some other neutral stimulus that has been paired with food
delivery.2 Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927) is less well known, but his motor
conditioning method is closer to operant conditioning, the method named and
exploited by B. F. Skinner.
Since René Descartes (1596–1650), philosopher, mathematician, and all-
round genius, in the seventeenth century, physiologists and psychologists
had been familiar with the idea of the refex, the inborn, almost-automatic
elicitation of a response, such as an eyeblink, by a suitable stimulus, such as
a puf of air to the eye. This apparently simple phenomenon, so similar to
the intuitive idea of cause and efect, was very attractive to Cartesians, who
wanted to understand animal behavior in mechanical terms. But learning
always posed something of a problem because, as an organism learns, previ
ously inefective stimuli become efective and previously efective stimuli
may cease to be so. Pavlov’s conditioned refex, in which a neutral stimulus
acquires the power to elicit a response, seemed to resolve this contradiction.3
18 History
Here was an apparently mechanical process that nevertheless allowed stimuli
to have diferent efects at diferent times. The refex model could be pre
served, but learning could be accommodated.
As experimental work progressed in the twentieth century, it became
increasingly obvious that Pavlovian or classical conditioning is, in fact, a
rather poor model for much of what humans and animals do. Classical con
ditioning, as originally conceived, is automatic, was thought to be restricted
to the autonomic (unconscious, involuntary) nervous system, and is not
goal-directed like voluntary behavior. Indeed, classical conditioning can
sometimes interfere with adaptive, goal-directed behavior. Instrumental or
operant conditioning (about which more in a moment) provides a much
better model for directed action, but at the cost of abandoning the simple
cause–efect, stimulus–response (S-R) behavioral building block. In fact, as
we will see, Pavlovian conditioning remains as a process that “sets the scene,”
providing the repertoire of potential actions from which reward and punish
ment can select.
None of this was apparent in the early part of the twentieth century,
when Watson frst saw the potential of Pavlovian experiments and analy
ses. Under the Pavlovian infuence, Watson placed heavy emphasis on S-R
learning. Despite, or perhaps because of, his early experience studying the
instinctive behavior of seabirds—terns—on the Dry Tortuga islands in the
Florida Keys, Watson thought that most human behavior is not instinctive.
In this he difered from William James, who thought that humans have not
fewer but more instincts than other animals. Watson’s biological training
had given him faith in the essential simplicity of all behavior. He therefore
believed that despite its apparent complexity, human behavior is basically
unmysterious and comprehensible. Seeking a simple alternative to instinct,
he hit on S-R learning, exemplifed by Pavlovian experiments, as a suitably
fexible means for the development of adaptive behavior during the lifetime
of the individual. Since the mechanism of S-R learning was presumed to be
well understood and common to many species, Watson, like Skinner after
him, gave priority to the environment as a determiner of behavior. Nurture,
not nature, was the key. This emphasis on the environment—and conse
quent de-emphasis on the constitution of the organism through which the
environment must act—has continued in the varieties of behaviorism that
grew out of Watson’s original manifesto.
Loeb and Tropisms

In addition to the Pavlovian and positivistic infuences, Watson’s approach to
psychology also owed a debt to biologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924), who was
one of his teachers. Loeb was a Jewish intellectual émigré from Germany who
came to the US to escape from discrimination in his native country (anti-
Semitism in Europe didn’t begin with Adolf Hitler). Loeb did well in the US,
spending most of his career at the University of Chicago. His work at that
Neo-Behaviorism and Learning Psychology 19
time was with invertebrates and plants, and as might be expected, he found
their behavior to be relatively simple. He invented a theory of what he called
tropisms, which are simple orienting mechanisms that allow these primitive
organisms to approach or avoid light, fnd food or a mate, and so on.
These processes are rather wonderful because they achieve apparently
intelligent results by very simple means. For example, bacteria like Salmo
nella (food poisoning) and E. coli (human gut) have only two ways to move:
either swimming relatively straight or “tumbling,” in which they constantly
move a short distance in a more or less random direction. Yet these literally
brainless creatures can move up a nutrient gradient, moving—inefciently
but eventually—from a low to a high concentration.
How do they do it? The answer is very simple. When they sense a posi
tive change in nutrient concentration, they switch from their “resting” state,
which is tumbling, to straight swimming. When nutrient concentration
ceases to change or begins to decrease, they revert to tumbling. In other
words, when things are getting better, go; when there is no change or things
are getting worse, look around (tumble). This process, called a kinesis, is a
prototype for behavioristic theory, deriving apparently complex behavior
from very simple rules.4
Figure 2.1 shows a simulated track generated by the tumble-and-swim
process. By taking large steps up the gradient and only small steps down, the
kinesis eventually takes the organism to the highest point. This process is a
type of hill climbing, which is perhaps the simplest kind of adaptive learning.
Kinesis-type strategies are common in evolution and in some human
situations. Natural selection tends to favor any improvement and, genetics
Figure 2.1 Tumble-and-swim orientation. A cone of nutrient concentration peaks at the

intersection of the two axes. The line shows a typical path when the organism
begins at the top right and winds up close to nutrient maximum at the origin.
20 History
being what it is, most changes from generation to generation are small.
Hence natural selection is a sort of hill climbing. Hill climbing usually
fnds a maximum in what has been called the adaptive landscape5 but it may
be a local maximum. It may fnd a small hill nearby but miss the mountain
farther on.
A kinesis is a mechanism—a simple rule or algorithm that, in the right
circumstances, generates adaptive behavior in real time. That is the sense in
which I use the term. An equivalent term, used in physics, is model—a well-
defned and usually simple process that mimics some aspect of the natural
world.
Mechanism is used in at least one other sense in psychology: to refer
to the physiological processes that underlie behavior. An example would be
the process that describes how simple eyes, such as the eye of Limulus
(horseshoe crab), detect contours. If adjacent visual receptors inhibit
each other, receptors on either side of a light–dark boundary will be
especially excited (on the light side) or inhibited (on the dark side),
allowing the visual system to enhance edges6 (Box 2.1). Learning, which
usually involves a large part of the nervous system of any animal that
shows it, has not yet been (and may never be) reduced to physiological
details like this, simply because the processes involved often seem to be
exceedingly complex.
Box 2.1 Lateral Inhibition

2.5
1.5
Value
0.5
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Input Output
To illustrate the principle of lateral inhibition the x-axis shows sixteen

sensory cells. The upper line shows the intensity of the light input,
which goes from low to high to low to high. The lower line shows the
sensory response. Each sensory cell inhibits its two neighbors accord
ing to the simple equation:
where IN is the stimulus to cell N , x N is the response of cell N and k

is a constant O < k < 1. Real lateral inhibition, in the eye of Limulus,
for example, is undoubtedly more complex than this. But the example
just shows how a very simple process, mutual inhibition, can produce
an adaptive result, in this case enhancing edges.
Feeding Dynamics
A mechanism in the abstract sense of a rule of operation may turn out to

have a physiological counterpart. But it is useful whether or not we find a
physiological match. Feeding is an example. Feeding involves both learn
ing and regulation. The learning aspect still awaits an adequate theory, but
the regulatory part can be explained to a large extent by a simple process
in which the satiating effects of food are delayed after ingestion. Food is
ingested and generates an inhibitory "satiation signal" that rises with time
after each bit of food . Eventually, the signal rises above a threshold and the
animal ceases to eat for a while until the satiation signal again declines below
the threshold.
So a simple behavioral model explains why eating takes place in meals,
how eating changes after an interruption, and some aspects of how animals
adapt to schedules of food reinforcement. It7 also predicts one or two sur
prising things . For example, if the animal is deprived of food for a certain
period, then all the eating deficit is made up during the first post-fast meal,
whose size is correlated with the period of food deprivation. Later meals are
of normal size. Without food deprivation, meal size and previous inter-meal
period are uncorrelated. Once-if- the details of the model are identified
with physiological structures, the model moves from being a mechanism, in
an abstract sense, to a physiological process.8
Watson never followed Loeb's lead in looking for mechanisms. He was
interested in human behavior and in learning, which could not easily be
handled by tropisms in the Loeb style-hence Watson's fascination with
conditioning. Nevertheless, he took from Loeb a preference for simple,
mechanistic explanations-a good idea, in principle. Unfortunately, Wat
son's idea of "simple" was too simple. I show in later chapters that the too
simple psychology endorsed by the radical behaviorism that came after
Watson is inadequate to describe even behavior as simple as habituation, the
diminishing response to a repeated neutral stimulus.
22 History
The Next Generation: Methodological Behaviorism
Watson’s target was the target of all psychologists: human behavior. But his
disavowal of consciousness, his inability to cope with the complexities of
verbal behavior, and his training as a biologist meant that the immediate
future of behaviorism lay with animal experiments.
Psychological work with animals had already been pioneered by Edward
L. Thorndike (1874–1949) frst at Harvard and then at Columbia Univer
sity. Thorndike was not then and never became a behaviorist. But the young
Thorndike was interested in animal behavior. In the basement of William
James’s house, he studied the behavior of cats escaping from puzzle boxes.
The animal had to push a pole or pull a chain to allow it to get out and eat
a little food. Thorndike discovered that his cats seemed to learn this task in a
rather simple way. At frst, they behaved more or less randomly, pushing the
pole at frst by accident. But then they would tend to repeat on the next trial
exactly the behavior that had been followed by reward on the previous trial.
Thorndike summarized his observations in what he called the Law of
Efect (see Box 2.2),9 which, despite its non-behavioristic tone (“satisfac
tion”? “discomfort”?), has become a sort of dogma. Thorndike’s puzzle-box
experiments were later repeated, and the cats’ behavior was photographed10
by Guthrie and Horton, who interpreted the behavior in a very simple,
associative way. Subsequent work has raised a number of questions about
their interpretation,11 but the Law of Efect is basically true—organisms do
tend to repeat behavior that has a good outcome and desist from behavior
that is punished—although exactly how it works is not as simple as Guthrie
and Horton thought.
Box 2.2 The Law of Efect
Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are

accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal . . .
will, other things being equal, be more frmly connected with the
situation . . . those which are accompanied or closely followed
by discomfort . . . will have their connections with the situation
weakened. . . . The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the
greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond.
—Edward L. Thorndike (1898)
Why did Thorndike do his experiments in William James’s basement

rather than in a Harvard building? Because there was at that time no
psychology department at Harvard. James was in the philosophy depart
ment, and the philosophers didn’t want animals in their building. Once
psychology became a separate discipline, this bias disappeared, but it has
returned in recent years. One reason is cognitivists’ discomfort with anything
that reminds them of behaviorism. Another reason is the huge regulatory-
compliance costs that now burden even noninvasive research with animals.
Laboratory animal research is now inordinately expensive. And the third
reason, which is not unrelated to the second, is the dominance of neuro
scientifc/physiological research with animals over purely behavioral work.
Thorndike did not consider himself a behaviorist; he is best known for his
work on education. The Law of Efect was not original with him. The Scot
Alexander Bain12 (1818–1903) had come to a very similar conclusion more
than 40 years earlier. But Bain did no experiments and Thorndike’s version
is the one in all the textbooks. The Law of Efect led to the development
of reinforcement theory, which has been the main theoretical preoccupation of
the behaviorist movement. Following the lead of Thorndike and Watson,
the next generation of behaviorists were the founders of the “rat psychol
ogy” that was to dominate the American academic scene for the next several
decades.
The three names usually associated with the behaviorism of the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s are Edwin Guthrie, Clark Hull, and Edward Tolman.
However, Watson’s real heir was B. F. Skinner, who rose to prominence a
little later. Skinner invented new experimental methods for studying learn
ing in animals. On the philosophical front, he applied behavioristic ideas to
every aspect of human experience, including consciousness. Skinner’s radical
behaviorism is Watson’s most infuential legacy. Because of Skinner’s infu
ence, and his willingness to speculate about every aspect of human experi
ence, his work is a major infuence in this book. But the context, and the
mainstream of behavioral psychology, was set by Hull and Tolman, to whose
work I turn next. (Box 2.3 summarizes the varieties of behaviorism that
arose in the US after Watson).13
Box 2.3 The Varieties of Behaviorism
There is no generally agreed classifcation, and some would add to or

modify this list. But it helps organize discussion.
CLASSICAL: The behaviorism of Watson; the objective study of

behavior; no mental life, no internal states; thought is covert speech.
METHODOLOGICAL: The objective study of third-person
behavior; the data of psychology must be intersubjectively
verifable; no theoretical prescriptions. Has been absorbed into
general experimental and cognitive psychology. Two popular
subtypes are
24 History
NEO-BEHAVIORISM: Hullian and post-Hullian, theoretical,

group data, not dynamic, physiological, and
PURPOSIVE BEHAVIORISM: Tolman’s behavioristic anticipa
tion of cognitive psychology.
RADICAL: Skinnerian behaviorism; includes a behavioral
approach to “mental life”; not mechanistic; internal states not
permitted.
TELEOLOGICAL: Post-Skinnerian, purposive, nonphysiological,
close to microeconomics.
THEORETICAL: Post-Skinnerian, accepts internal states (the
skin makes a diference); dynamic, but eclectic in choice of the
oretical structures; emphasizes parsimony.
Clark L. Hull
Watson was one of the frst to put rats through mazes, but the technique was
exploited most extensively by Yale psychologist Clark L. Hull (1884–1952)
and his followers, most notably his chief disciple the tough-minded Kenneth
Spence (1907–1967). Hull was a late developer in psychology, but in his
middle years, he became acquainted with the theory of physics, in its classi
cal, Newtonian form. No great mathematician himself, he was nevertheless
excited by the axiomatic method and pursued it doggedly. His major con
tribution was a book, The Principles of Behavior (1943), in which he proposed
a mathematical formulation to explain learning in the white rat.
Hull was a catalyst rather than a great teacher. His weekly seminars at
Yale became famous, and his ideas were spread by those who attended them
to many other universities across the US. But his most prominent follow
ers were supervised by others, and few of his own students made names in
academic psychology.
Experimental Method
Hull’s between-group experimental method, termed Null Hypothesis Statistical
Test (NHST), is still the norm in most of psychology. Groups of subjects
are exposed to diferent conditions. The individuals in control and experi
mental groups are selected at random to make the groups as similar as pos
sible. (Randomization is rarely a problem in the animal laboratory, but when
the subjects14 are human, real randomization can be difcult.) Control and
experimental groups are then compared.
For Hull and his co-workers, the subjects were rats, and the conditions
usually related to the amount type or probability of reward—rats running,
one at a time, down a straight runway to food pellets of diferent sizes, for
example. The performances of the individuals (e.g., their running speeds,
learning rates) are then averaged and compared statistically to see if the
independent variable (e.g., pellet size) has an efect. The method, as a way
of understanding processes that take place in individuals rather than in the
group, rests on assumptions about the essential uniformity of the subjects,
and what they were doing, that were not understood for many years. Indeed,
the limitations of what has come to be termed between-group methodology
have not been fully assimilated by the psychological community (see Chap
ter 8). The limitations of the competing, within-subject, method are some
what better understood, as we will see shortly, but its advantages have yet to
be fully exploited.
“Frustration” Efect
Neo-behaviorists used groups even when the conditions being compared
could be studied with single animals. An example is the so-called frustration
efect (FE), which was demonstrated in 1952 with hungry rats running in a
“double runway,” that is, a runway with two goal boxes: G1, a short way
from the start box and, the second, G2, some distance after that: a short frst
runway followed by a much longer second one. In training, the rat runs to
G1 and gets a bit of food; then he runs to G2 and gets another bit of food.
The experimenter measures how fast the rat runs right after G1, in the frst
part of the long second runway.
The rat always gets food in G2. The experiment is in two phases. In the
frst phase, he gets food in G1 on every trial. Thus, he learns to expect food
in the frst goal box. In the second phase, he gets food in the frst goal box
on only half the trials: rewarded on half, “frustrated” on half. The question
is, How fast does he run in the long runway after food and after no-food, in
the frst goal box? The answer is that after training, he runs faster when there
is no food in the mid-goal box compared to when there is food, especially in
the frst third of the long runway. This elevated response is the “FE,” a sup
posedly excitatory efect of nonreward (i.e., absence of an expected reward).
Even though the FE only involves a comparison within the same individual,
the original experiment15 used no less than eighteen rats.
Why a group experiment? There are at least two reasons. One is that
group experiments were the norm at that time. Amsel and Roussel were
not the only ones to use many animals when one or two should have suf
fced. The second reason is that the efect was relatively small and probably
only showed up reliably in the group average. (More on the hazards of aver
aging later.)
The FE (now termed the omission efect) was replicated much later in an
experiment with a handful of pigeons using an operant procedure that pro
duced much larger single-subject efects than the rat-runway setup. Using
this method, it was possible to show conclusively that the FE was not an
energizing efect of nonreward, a conceptually problematic idea in any
26 History
case, but an inhibitory efect of reward. The FE represents disinhibition,
not excitation.16
Like all the early behaviorists, Hull was a philosophical descendent of the
British Empiricist philosophers, John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and the great
Scot David Hume, and inherited their belief in associations as the primary
psychological units. Hull was, for a while, much impressed by logical positiv
ism, the position of the Vienna Circle17 of philosophers, and others. He had
earlier been infuenced by the formalism of Isaac Newton’s Principia Math
ematica (1687). The latter two infuences led him to prefer a mathematical,
highly formal approach to theory. Like Skinner and many other American
scientists in the Edison tradition, he was a gifted gadgeteer, but unlike Skin
ner, he admired abstract theory more than practical machinery.
It is helpful to organize the theoretical ideas of Hull and Tolman in terms
of three questions: What data did they seek to explain? Where did their
theoretical concepts come from? and What form did their theories take?
Clark Hull was interested in explaining data from experiments with groups
of rats learning simple tasks under the action of food reward and with groups
of people learning to recall lists of nonsense syllables (i.e., trigrams such as
JIV that do not correspond to actual words) under verbal instructions. In the
rat experiments, the data to be explained were not the moment-by-moment
behavior of individuals but “functional relations” based on data from groups
of subjects. Much was made, for example, of the negatively accelerated learn
ing curve that relates a measure of performance on a learning task to learning
trials. A measure such as the average percentage of correct responses in a
two-choice task typically increases rapidly at frst and then more slowly as it
approaches 100% (Box 1.1 shows an example of such a curve in two other
contexts). Another standard function was the delay-of-reinforcement gradient,
which showed how performance declines as the time between the rewarded
(reinforced) response and the reinforcement is increased.
Hull’s theoretical concepts came from an associationist view of the causal
chain between stimulus and response and a Watsonian notion of “ideas” as
manifestations of overt or covert motor activity. The “association of ideas”
seems to have come originally from Greek philosophy. Aristotle suggested
that ideas that occur close together in time are automatically linked in the
mind, as are things that are similar. Temporal proximity and similarity are
long-established principles of association.
For Hull, each “response” was characterized by a fnal “strength,” called
reaction potential, which was, in turn, determined by intervening variables (a
term from Tolman, about whom more in a moment) such as habit strength
and generalization. The variability characteristic of behavior was accommo
dated by the assumption of behavioral oscillation of reaction potential—what
would now be termed a stochastic (variable-in-time) process. Each of these
intervening variables was assumed to be linked in some way to observables.
Experimental results were deduced as formal predictions from this rather
lumbering system.
Figure 2.2 Time relations between a conditioned stimulus (e.g., a tone, conditional
stimulus [CS]: light lines) and an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., food, uncon
ditioned stimulus [US]: heavy lines) in some Pavlovian conditioning pro
cedures. In delay conditioning, for example, after one of these pairings has
been repeated a sufcient number of times, the response reliably made to the
US (e.g., salivation the conditioned response, or CR) occurs when the CS
is presented. In trace conditioning, the CR usually occurs after the CS and
close to the time when the US will occur. In temporal conditioning, each US
presentation is the efective CS for the next US.
Some of Hull’s theoretical elements were drawn from Pavlov, many of

whose ideas were based on his conjectures about brain function. The basic
“glue” that allowed learning to occur was assumed to be Pavlovian condition
ing, conceived of as a process by which stimulus and response become caus
ally linked. This usage of the term conditioning—which has become standard
among Hull’s intellectual descendants—goes well beyond Pavlov’s. Pavlov
used a Russian word better translated as “conditional” so that his account
is descriptive rather than theoretical. He implied nothing more than the
observation that elicitation of salivation (the conditioned response: CR) by the
tone (conditioned stimulus: CS) is conditional upon pairing between the CS
and the unconditioned stimulus (US), food (see Figure 2.2). But for Hullians,
“conditioning” was not just a description but a process. Conditioning was a
theoretical atom, which could be used to explain more complex behavior.
Generalization
The idea that training with one stimulus and response will increase the ten
dency to respond to similar stimuli and to make similar responses was another
idea from Pavlov. Other concepts came from Sherringtonian refexology
28 History
Figure 2.3 C. S. Sherrington (1856–1952) was an English physiologist whose book The
Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906) summarized most of what was
then known about the refex and exerted a strong infuence on the evolution
of American psychology, especially behaviorism. But, like some other famous
neurophysiologists, he ended up as no behaviorist—writing, in his eighties, a
Cartesian, dualist philosophical rumination, Man on His Nature (1940).
(Figure 2.3), for example, the idea of reception, a process modeled on what
was then known of receptor physiology. The idea of interaction between
stimulus efects, which was added to accommodate “whole-greater-than
sum-of-parts” efects made famous by the German Gestalt (form) psycholo
gists.18 And fnally the idea of a stimulus trace that persists after the physical
stimulus has ceased.
How were these ideas put together to explain learning? A detailed exposi
tion would take me well beyond the confnes of a short survey—and would,
in any case, be of largely historical interest. But some of the basic ideas
can be conveyed simply. Hull tied reinforcement, the strengthening efect of
reward on a response that produces it, to the reduction of physiological need.
This turned out to be a hard assumption to prove: many rewarding events,
especially in humans (fame, money, art, fashion), have no obvious link to
physiology. Even food, the prototypical reinforcer, is efective as a rein
forcer long before it has any nutritional consequences. The rat may well
repeat his bar pressing after he gets the very frst food pellet, long before his
blood sugar or any other gross physiological measure shows any change. So
much for physiological need. Moreover, the theoretical efects of reinforcing
events can be described without specifying their physiological concomitants.
The concept of conditioned or secondary reinforcement was invented to bridge
the gap between physiologically efective reinforcers and “neutral” stimuli
which acquire reinforcing properties, but this idea is still problematic.19
How did Hull conceive of the efects of reinforcement? One efect was to
“condition” events occurring at the time the “goal” (e.g., food at the end of
the maze) is reached. The basic idea was that any pair of events, A–B, that
regularly occur in succession somehow become linked (just as the CS and
the US become linked) so that the occurrence of A will come to call up
B. This is just a physiological interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of associa
tion through succession and temporal contiguity, interpreted as post hoc, ergo
propter hoc—B follows A; hence, A caused B. Thus, stimuli near the goal,
traces of earlier stimuli and stimuli generated by movements, or “fractional
anticipatory” movements (proprioception again) may become conditioned
to the “goal response.” In this way, the goal response will “move forward”
and occur earlier and earlier. This improvement in performance is the visible
evidence that learning has occurred.
Hull defned parts of this complex process in a quantitative way, but the
details were never fully specifed by Hull or by his several successors, most
of whom flled in theoretical gaps as best they could with verbal arguments.
Numerous faws in the system were pointed out,20 and Hull’s successors
increasingly abandoned quantitative modeling in favor of enthusiastic data
gathering. The mathematical approach was carried forward largely by math
ematical learning theorists.21 A single, very infuential theoretical paper by two
neo-Hullian Yale psychologists, Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner,22 also
led to several elaborations by Wagner and others and something of a theoreti
cal revival. Rescorla and Wagner showed that temporal contiguity is not by
itself sufcient to produce conditioning: the CS must in some sense predict the
US—precede it reliably. Models in the Hullian tradition continue to appear
in the literature on classical conditioning (also known as associative learning).
Hull’s other direction was the study of verbal learning. The nonsense-
syllable method he used was pioneered by German experimental psycholo
gist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), the founder of the feld of verbal
learning. Hull and several co-workers in 1940 put together an extraordinary
volume describing their theory of how people learn nonsense syllables. The
title of this book, Mathematico-deductive Theory of Rote Learning,23 shows its
allegiance to positivistic philosophy of science, and the theory was presented
in a highly formal way, using the calculus of symbolic logic (Fitch, one of
the book’s co-authors, was a logician). Hull defended the book as follows:
“Its chief value consists in the large-scale pioneering demonstration of the
logico-empirical methodology in the feld of behavior” (p. xi).
To a modern reader, the “logico-empirical methodology” with its rhet
oric of mathematical theorems and corollaries, makes the work almost
30 History
unreadable. Nevertheless, the assumptions of the theory are relatively sim
ple—and important, because these ingredients, in various combinations,
are part of most subsequent psychological theories. The theory explains
the patterns of learning of nonsense syllables in a serial anticipation pro
cedure: each syllable in a short list of 5 to 20 syllables is presented for a
couple of seconds, and the subject’s task is to anticipate the next syllable.
Data of interest are the patterns of errors—such as the serial-position efect,
which is that syllables at the beginning (primacy) and end (recency) of the
list are better remembered than syllables in the middle—and the efects of
the temporal spacing between list presentations (e.g., in comparisons of
spaced vs. massed practice).
The serial-position efect was discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus in
1885. A modern version of his experiment looks like this:24 subjects are
shown a series of ffteen words, then tested for recall of the words imme
diately or after 30 seconds. When tested immediately, people remembered
items at the beginning and end of the series better than those in the middle.
This is the serial position efect. Memory for words at the end of the list
fades when the test is delayed for 30 seconds or more. As a methodological
footnote, although modern experiments always use groups and averaged
data, Ebbinghaus used just one subject—himself. His pioneering experi
ment would not be publishable in a contemporary psychological journal.
The reader can decide whether this refects poorly on Ebbinghaus or on
modern journal practices.
It is also worth noting that the serial-position efect suggests that remem
bered items interfere with one another so that recall of items in the middle
are recalled less frequently than items at the beginning and end of a list—just
like the lateral-inhibition process illustrated in Box 2.1. There is more to serial
recall than this, but interference of this sort is undoubtedly part of the process.
The chief theoretical ingredient in explaining memory efects is the
quasi-physiological idea of a memory trace, supposedly left by each trigram
as the subject attends to it. Thus, the recency efect fades after 30 seconds
because the trace of the last item fades to the point that there is interference
with the traces of earlier items, which are now, relatively, as almost recent
as the last item. This works because memory traces fade rapidly at frst and
then more slowly25 so that the traces of two successive items become more
similar as time elapses.
Traces are of two kinds, excitatory and inhibitory. “Response strength,”
the tendency to recall a particular syllable, is proportional to the algebraic
sum of these two tendencies. A correct anticipation is presumed to occur
when the summed strength exceeds a threshold, which is subject to some
intrinsic variability. Thus, as the trace strengths of two items approach each
other, confusion between them will increase. These ingredients, a decaying
trace, excitatory and inhibitory contributions to a strength variable, stochas
ticity, and the idea of response threshold, were to form a permanent part of
the theoretical toolbox used by later learning theorists.
Another random document with
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sœur, j’ai souvent entendu dire que si elle manquait d’expression,
elle avait un brillant doigté.
Hervé pensa, à part soi, que reprocher à Mlle de Trivières de
manquer de sentiment musical était une grande injustice, et il écouta
de nouveau.
Cette fois, le chant d’une belle voix de contralto se mariait aux
sons du piano.
Il reconnut la plainte désolée de Fortunio :
Si vous croyez que je vais dire

Qui j’ose aimer…
Au milieu du silence de la nuit, les paroles arrivaient, distinctes.

De sa voix richement timbrée, la jeune fille chanta les trois
couplets, d’une si fine sensibilité. Après qu’elle eut laissé tomber
lentement les dernières paroles :
Et je veux mourir pour ma mie

Sans la nommer…
Hervé de Kéravan poussa un profond soupir.

Jacques lui dit :
— Ma sœur a une belle voix. Diane est en veine, ce soir ; il y a
longtemps qu’elle n’avait chanté comme cela.
Hervé ne répondit pas.
Les yeux fixes, dans la nuit, il songeait.
Une voix qui parlait au-dessus d’eux les fit tressaillir :
— Tu es là, Jacques ? Tu vas t’enrhumer. On vient de porter le
thé, rentre donc !
— Encore un petit moment ! On est si bien dehors.
— Tu attendais ton sauvage, tu vois qu’il n’est pas venu !
Un éclat de rire de Jacques répondit, en même temps qu’une
forme sombre se dessinait au bas du balcon, et qu’une voix grave
disait :
— Le sauvage est ici, mademoiselle, depuis assez longtemps. Il
tient à déclarer qu’il est assez civilisé pour apprécier le talent d’une
musicienne telle que vous et il vous est reconnaissant du plaisir que
vous lui avez donné.
Le sauvage ne s’exprimait pas trop mal. C’était le discours le plus
long qu’Hervé eût encore adressé à Mlle de Trivières. Il est vrai que
l’obscurité favorise les timides.
Confuse d’abord, Diane avait rougi dans l’ombre.
Puis, elle prit le parti de rire et dit plaisamment :
— Je suis enchantée de vous avoir fait plaisir… sans le savoir.
Monsieur le sauvage, vous seriez bien aimable de dire à mon
imprudent de frère qu’il va prendre un rhume sous ce balcon
humide, et vous viendrez avec lui prendre une tasse de thé qui vous
attend ici. Mlle Guiraud va se réveiller tout exprès pour vous en faire
les honneurs.
— Ne la dérange pas, s’écria Jacques, ce serait un meurtre !
Laisse-la dormir. Je sais un moyen d’éviter de la réveiller. Allons,
mon lieutenant, un peu de gymnastique !
Ce disant, le jeune garçon avait saisi le tronc noueux du lilas,
dont les branches montaient à hauteur du balcon. De la plus haute, il
s’agrippa au rebord ajouré des pierres formant saillie et fit un saut
jusqu’auprès de sa sœur.
Hervé de Kéravan l’imita et arriva au balcon presque en même
temps et se trouva devant Mlle de Trivières qu’il salua
respectueusement.
— Mademoiselle, dit-il de sa voix profonde, voyez combien vous
aviez raison, tout à l’heure, en me traitant de sauvage : voici la
première fois que j’entre chez vous et il faut que ce soit par la
fenêtre ! Le sauvage s’en excuse et l’homme civilisé dépose à vos
pieds ses respectueux hommages.
Diane tendit la main avec un sourire.
— C’est à moi de m’excuser, monsieur. J’ai parlé de vous un
peu… cavalièrement ! Si j’avais pu me douter que vous étiez ici…
Il répondit, toujours sérieux :
— Vous n’avez rien dit d’autre que la vérité, mademoiselle, j’en ai
bien peur…
Ils rentrèrent dans le salon où Mlle Guiraud, n’entendant plus de
musique, venait de secouer sa somnolence. Jacques présenta son
grand ami.
Diane servit le thé.
Elle était animée, en train, très en beauté. Sa taille haute et
gracieuse mettait une note de clarté dans tous les endroits du salon
où l’officier suivait du regard le sillage de sa robe blanche.
C’était la première fois qu’il la voyait dans son cadre habituel, et
en vêtements d’intérieur ; il s’étonnait de la trouver très féminine de
gestes et d’allure et reconnaissait à peine l’amazone des bois à la
fière tournure qui lui avait paru si distante.
Celle-ci était plus accessible… Sa parole simple, presque
familière, le charmait. Elle le traitait non seulement en invité, mais en
ami déjà ancien… Le mot qu’elle venait de jeter du haut du balcon,
ce mot de sauvage qui se rapportait à leur première rencontre, avait
rompu la glace.
Hervé eut l’impression qu’à partir de cette soirée, leurs relations
étaient changées.
Désormais il la retrouverait dans son souvenir non plus en
amazone hardie, mais en femme délicieusement gracieuse et
belle… Il comprit que sa destinée était fixée, que l’amour impossible
entré dans son cœur n’en sortirait plus, mais de même que Fortunio
il se sentait de force à
Mourir pour sa mie

Sans la nommer !
Mlle de Trivières, lui ayant arraché l’aveu qu’il était « un peu »
musicien, le força de se mettre au piano pour lui accompagner l’air
de Dalila : « Réponds à ma tendresse », réclamé par son frère.
Hervé avait parlé trop modestement de ses talents de musicien.
A la vérité, l’aînée de ses sœurs, artiste supérieure et professeur
consciencieux, s’était appliquée à lui communiquer une partie de son
talent.
Il était devenu par ses soins, secondés par de grandes aptitudes
naturelles, un excellent musicien, ce dont Mlle de Trivières s’aperçut
très vite.
Quand il eut fini, elle lui dit, avec cet air d’accorder une faveur
qu’avaient ses moindres paroles :
— Nous ferons encore de la musique avant votre départ. Je n’ai
jamais trouvé personne qui m’accompagnât comme vous… Il faudra
revenir.
Le jeune officier devait se souvenir longtemps de cette soirée et y
repenser plus tard pendant les mortelles heures d’attente dans les
tranchées.
Il devait revoir souvent les yeux admirables, la taille flexible, le
teint nacré, brillant sous les cheveux bruns comme un reflet de lune
dans une nuit obscure, et ce sourire indéfinissable des lèvres qui
disaient :
« Il faudra revenir. » Oui, souvent, souvent, il devait y penser !
Le lendemain et les jours qui suivirent, le temps permit aux
jeunes gens de reprendre leurs excursions, non seulement au bois,
mais dans les environs de Paris.
Diane était devenue matinale et ne se faisait jamais attendre.
Ils partaient de bonne heure, et, d’un galop, gagnaient les portes
des fortifications.
Ces excursions, qui les ramenaient souvent très tard, étaient un
grand plaisir pour l’étudiant. Jacques s’était pris d’une grande
affection pour le Breton, dont l’esprit sérieux savait se mettre à la
portée de son âge.
Bien que toujours réservé avec Diane, le lieutenant avait
désormais avec elle de longues causeries animées. Il se laissait aller
au plaisir de la voir chaque jour, de jouir de sa présence pendant le
peu de temps qui lui restait à dépenser. Plus tard… c’était le grand
aléa, l’inconnu mystérieux qui, peut-être, l’éloignerait d’elle à jamais !
En attendant, il jouissait pleinement du présent.
La jeune fille, de son côté, paraissait de jour en jour goûter
davantage sa société ; c’était elle maintenant qui rappelait à Jacques
leurs rendez-vous.
Auprès d’Hervé, elle se donnait le plaisir rare d’être franche,
naturelle, délivrée enfin de la crainte qui l’avait poursuivie si
longtemps.
Le caractère d’Hervé de Kéravan le mettait au-dessus des
calculs intéressés ; il avait si peu des allures de prétendant ! Ainsi
que Diane l’avait dit à son frère, au début de leurs relations, « celui-
là ne ressemblait pas aux autres, et il ne saurait jamais lui faire la
cour… »
Quand cette pensée lui revenait à la mémoire, c’était comme un
hommage rendu à l’élévation d’esprit de l’officier et comme une
marque de confiance qu’elle lui accordait.
Au cours de leurs longues chevauchées, l’éducation morale de
Diane faisait aussi un rapide chemin. Auprès de ce soldat, à qui son
passé d’héroïsme donnait une singulière autorité, Mlle de Trivières
se sentait parfois très petite fille… Il lui arrivait de souhaiter une
approbation, une marque d’estime venant de ce héros et, sentant
confusément combien sa vie frivole de naguère devait déplaire à sa
tournure d’esprit, elle évitait d’en parler.
Un jour, en rentrant à l’hôtel, le lieutenant prévint ses amis qu’il
serait privé de les voir le lendemain. Il avait promis de visiter un de
ses camarades blessés, en traitement au Val-de-Grâce.
— Je regrette de ne pouvoir aller avec vous, dit Diane. J’aurais
aimé visiter un hôpital.
— Il me sera très facile de vous faire pénétrer au Val-de-Grâce,
répondit de Kéravan, si vous le désirez. C’est là que j’ai été soigné
lors de ma première blessure, et j’ai gardé d’excellentes relations
avec un major en chef… En m’adressant à lui, j’obtiendrai aisément,
je crois, votre introduction.
— Cela nous sera très agréable, dit Jacques, mais nous ne
voudrions pas vous gêner…
— Nullement. Venez demain vers dix heures dans la cour du Val-
de-Grâce, je m’y trouverai et j’aurai obtenu d’avance les
autorisations nécessaires. Vous pourrez visiter certaines salles
pendant que je me rendrai auprès de mon malheureux camarade.
CHAPITRE III
A l’heure convenue, Mlle de Trivières et son frère descendaient

d’auto devant la grille de l’hôpital.
Ils aperçurent le lieutenant qui causait avec un médecin militaire
dans un angle de la cour.
Il vint à leur rencontre et présenta le major, qui se mit à la
disposition des jeunes gens pour les conduire à travers le dédale
des couloirs vers les salles de blessés.
Pendant que Diane et Jacques de Trivières partaient,
accompagnés du major, Kéravan allait de suite rejoindre son
malade, le sous-lieutenant Jacquet, qui l’attendait.
Diane n’avait jamais pénétré dans une salle d’hôpital ; elle
éprouvait en ce moment même une vague répugnance, mais
intérieurement elle se reprocha cette mauvaise disposition et
dompta, par un effort de volonté, la légère hésitation qui l’arrêta sur
le seuil.
Qu’était-ce que la vue pénible des pansements tachés de sang ?
Qu’était-ce que l’odeur fade qui lui fit porter à son visage son petit
mouchoir parfumé, auprès des trésors d’héroïsme dépensés par ces
hommes, leurs longues souffrances, leurs sacrifices sans nombre ?
Diane pensa à ces choses d’une façon confuse en s’avançant aux
côtés du major, entre les rangées de lits.
Ce n’était pas l’heure habituelle des visites. Aussi l’entrée
d’étrangers provoqua-t-elle une petite sensation parmi les malades.
Appuyés sur leur coude, ceux qui pouvaient remuer suivaient des
yeux la jeune fille dont la radieuse beauté leur faisait l’effet d’une
vision de rêve.
Diane avait apporté des boîtes de cigarettes. De place en place
le major lui désignait les blessés auxquels il était permis de fumer.
Elle présenta d’abord la boîte de loin, sans se courber, avec son
grand air de condescendance qui n’empêchait pas les regards
d’admiration de se porter sur elle…
Ce lui était une gêne…
Au fond de la première salle, un soldat barbu dont un énorme
pansement entourait l’épaule veuve de son bras, laissa échapper :
— Mazette ! la belle fille !
Au froncement de sourcils du major, il comprit qu’il avait dit une
sottise et se cacha la tête sous sa couverture.
Mais Diane, choquée d’abord, se pencha bientôt avec plus de
grâce au-dessus des lits de souffrance. L’exclamation brutale venait
de lui faire comprendre quelle joie était la vue de sa beauté aux yeux
de ces malheureux, repus de spectacles d’horreur.
Ainsi qu’elle le faisait naguère au temps de sa vie mondaine,
mais d’une autre manière, avec une nuance de pitié tendre, elle se
mit en frais de coquetterie pour eux.
Tout à fait humanisée, réconciliée avec leur souffrance, elle
abaissa sur les visages ravagés de fièvre son rayonnant sourire.
Elle semblait demander pardon aux pauvres êtres mutilés de se
montrer à eux telle qu’elle était : toute épanouie de grâce et de
santé.
Une douce expression atténua l’éclat de ses yeux.
Elle n’eut plus l’air de porter son offrande comme une aumône,
mais elle trouva un mot aimable pour chacun ; son pas souple
s’attardait devant les plus malades, et elle leur réservait ses plus
doux sourires.
Au moment d’entrer dans la salle où ils devaient retrouver de
Kéravan, le major s’arrêta, la main posée sur le bouton de la porte.
— Mademoiselle, dit-il en baissant la voix, je vous préviens que si
vous n’êtes pas habituée à la vue des plus affreuses blessures, ou si
vous ne pouvez compter absolument sur vos nerfs, il vaudrait mieux
vous arrêter ici… C’est dans cette salle que nous traitons les
blessures de la face…
Diane jeta un coup d’œil à son frère, qui paraissait décidé. Elle
répondit sans hésiter :
— Je préfère entrer.
Mais, malgré sa résolution de bravoure, le premier regard que
jeta la jeune fille sur le lit placé à sa droite lui révéla d’un coup toute
la souffrance humaine.
Elle ne put retenir une exclamation de pitié ou d’horreur à la vue
du visage, ou plutôt d’une moitié de visage tuméfié… Une énorme
balafre le coupait, laissant une orbite vide, que la cicatrice non
complètement fermée tirait sur la joue, de côté. La bouche n’avait
plus qu’une lèvre pendante, l’autre, fendue par le milieu, laissait à
découvert des dents cassées, un trou béant !
C’était affreux… pitoyable !
Diane frissonna, pendant que le major lui disait tout bas :
— Je vous avais prévenue, mademoiselle.
De loin, elle vit le lieutenant de Kéravan qui s’avançait à sa
rencontre ; elle se raidit et, se dominant par un violent effort, elle
s’approcha tout près du blessé puis, avec un sourire très doux, les
yeux sur l’atroce blessure, elle dit gracieusement, comme dans un
salon :
— Voulez-vous me faire le plaisir, monsieur, d’accepter une
cigarette ?
C’était un officier. Un sous-lieutenant tout jeune, blessé à sa
première rencontre.
Il saisit le mouvement de sublime pitié qui se penchait vers lui, et
Diane vit passer sur ce chaos de débris qui avait été beau visage
d’homme, une reconnaissance éperdue.
Quand elle releva la tête, ses yeux rencontrèrent ceux de
Kéravan fixés sur elle et son regard profond rempli d’une muette
admiration.
Il vint à elle et la voyant très pâle :
— Voulez-vous, dit-il, que nous passions rapidement et que je
vous fasse sortir par l’autre porte ?
— Non, dit-elle avec calme, je n’ai pas fini ma distribution, il y
aurait des jaloux.
Elle continua d’aller de lit en lit, passant seulement sans s’arrêter
lorsqu’une tête détournée à dessein l’avertissait que le blessé avait
la pudeur de sa laideur.
En approchant de l’extrémité de la salle, Mlle de Trivières
reconnut le malade auprès de qui se tenait le lieutenant de Kéravan
quand ils étaient entrés.
Elle allait à lui.
Hervé lui dit, très vite :
— Non, mademoiselle, je crois qu’il préfère… que vous ne le
voyiez pas… Il est honteux, le pauvre garçon.
Diane répondit doucement en baissant les yeux :
— Je vais passer sans le regarder… voici la boîte, donnez-lui
tout ce qui reste et dites-lui… dites-lui qu’il a grand tort d’être
honteux… Plus leurs blessures sont hideuses, plus elles sont belles,
et plus ils ont le droit d’en être fiers…
Hervé sourit pour toute réponse et se dirigea vers le lit de son
camarade.
Lorsqu’il rejoignit la jeune fille un moment après, il lui dit d’un ton
d’émotion contenue :
— Il vous est très reconnaissant, mademoiselle ; il vous
remercie : il est très ému… très touché…
Et elle comprit, au regard qui accompagnait ces paroles, que le
lieutenant se les appropriait et que c’était lui qui venait de dire :
« Je suis très ému… très touché !… »
Elle rougit en détournant la tête et s’empressa de se joindre à
son frère qui remerciait le major de son aimable accueil.
Ils remontèrent tous ensemble dans l’auto qui les ramena avenue
Malakoff.
Mais Jacques alimenta presque à lui seul la conversation ; ses
compagnons de route, et surtout Diane, paraissaient absorbés par
leurs réflexions.
— Eh bien, Diane, fit-il enfin, à quoi penses-tu ? Tu gardes pour
toi seule tes impressions. Tu sais que je t’ai trouvée rudement
« chic » tout à l’heure dans la dernière salle. Demande à M. de
Kéravan. J’ai vu que le major s’attendait à te voir piquer une crise de
nerfs comme l’auraient fait neuf femmes sur dix.
— Je crois que tu te trompes, répondit-elle. Si les femmes
n’apprennent pas pendant cette guerre à dompter leurs nerfs, quand
le feront-elles ?
Si Mme de Trivières avait entendu la réponse de sa fille, elle se
serait demandé avec stupeur comment Diane avait pu changer à ce
point…
Cette dernière ajouta comme pour mieux faire saisir sa pensée
sous la forme d’une comparaison :
— Tu te souviens lorsque mon amie Lucie est partie à Salonique
pour soigner les blessés ? J’ai dit — et nous étions tous du même
avis — j’ai dit que c’était une folie, un suicide !
— Oui, je me souviens.
— Eh bien ! aujourd’hui, je comprends son héroïsme et je
l’approuve ! Tant que l’on n’a pas tout donné, on n’a rien donné.
— Bon, s’écria Jacques, stupéfait. Tu ne vas pas nous faire le
tour de t’enrôler pour Salonique ! Mon cher lieutenant, vous avez
bien réussi en menant ma sœur voir des blessés !
Diane reprit en souriant :
— Je remercie M. de Kéravan qui m’a procuré ce matin l’une des
meilleures émotions que j’aie ressenties de ma vie… et des plus
douces.
Hervé salua en balbutiant quelques mots, et Diane reporta son
regard sur le paysage mouvant qui filait à la portière.
Elle continuait de poursuivre sa pensée intérieure.
Le lieutenant, assis auprès de la jeune fille, ne voyait d’elle que
son profil perdu, nettement découpé sur la glace.
Il lui parut que le beau sphinx venait de soulever les voiles qui
dérobaient à la vue ses secrètes pensées et qu’il les refermait à
nouveau.
Au moment de la séparation, au seuil de la maison, Jacques pria
son ami de venir encore passer quelques soirées avec eux avant
son départ.
Mais Kéravan, alléguant son désir de passer auprès de son
aïeule les dernières soirées, s’excusa.
Du reste, il allait être obligé de retourner en Bretagne, où il irait
ramener son cheval, et il profiterait de cette circonstance pour jeter
sur son domaine le coup d’œil du propriétaire.
— Lieutenant, s’écria Jacques de Trivières, désolé, vous n’allez
pas partir comme cela, sans nous donner encore un jour ! Faisons
demain la grande promenade dont nous avions parlé, dans la vallée
de Chevreuse. Ma sœur et moi ne la connaissons pas et nous
aurons bien plus de plaisir à y aller avec vous.
Hervé hésitait.
Il attendait un mot de la jeune fille avant d’accepter.
— Je désire beaucoup, dit Diane, connaître cet endroit que vous
dites si joli. S’il fait beau demain, voulez-vous pour la dernière fois
nous servir de guide ?
Il s’inclina.
— Je serai trop heureux, mademoiselle, de vous satisfaire. Mais
vous ne pouvez entreprendre une excursion aussi longue en un seul
jour. Si vous voulez bien me confier vos chevaux avec votre jeune
domestique, je les conduirai à Versailles où ils passeront la nuit, et
vous les y trouverez demain. Nous pourrons prendre un train de
bonne heure pour Versailles, cela raccourcira de beaucoup la
distance.
— C’est une excellente idée, approuva Jacques, demain soir,
nous dînerons aux Réservoirs et nous pourrons prendre encore le
chemin de fer pour rentrer… Qu’en pensez-vous ?
Firmin ramènera nos chevaux après-demain.
— Mais, objecta Diane en regardant l’officier, cela vous privera
d’une des soirées que vous vouliez réserver à madame votre
grand’mère.
— Le sacrifice sera compensé par le plaisir de la passer avec
vous.
La matinée du lendemain se leva dans un réseau de brumes
bleuâtres qui promettaient une éclatante journée de printemps.
En débarquant à la gare des Chantiers vers neuf heures, la
première personne que virent les jeunes de Trivières fut le
lieutenant, leur ami, qui les avait précédés.
Leur domestique tenait les chevaux en main à l’extérieur des
grilles.
Diane avait passé un long cache-poussière par-dessus son
costume de cheval, elle s’en débarrassa et sauta en selle à la porte
de la gare.
Sous les allées ombreuses et ensuite à travers bois, ils prirent la
route des Vaux de Cernay.
Tous trois, enchantés de la lumineuse journée de printemps, de
leur jeunesse, de leur sympathie réciproque, bavardaient et riaient à
qui mieux mieux.
Pour l’officier, c’étaient les dernières heures de répit avant la
séparation définitive…
Il ne se lassait pas d’entendre la jeune fille.
Heureuse comme une pensionnaire à qui on a mis la bride sur le
cou, celle-ci montrait une animation inusitée. Les cheveux au vent,
les yeux brillants, Hervé lui répondait avec le même entrain décidé à
jouir de l’heureux temps, si court, qu’il ne retrouverait sans doute
jamais.
Vers onze heures, ils arrivaient en vue du petit restaurant de la
mère Hippolyte où M. de Kéravan avait promis qu’on trouverait un
bon déjeuner.
— Le service ne ressemblera guère à celui des Réservoirs, mais
la cuisine vous dédommagera.
Cette brave femme vous aura bientôt confectionné une gibelotte
de lapin exquise et une fricassée de poulet dont elle a la réputation.
Mlle de Trivières était décidée à trouver tout bon et agréable,
même la serviette de grosse toile qui remplaçait la nappe, les
assiettes de faïence blanches et bleues enluminées de naïfs
personnages, les couverts d’étain frottés et reluisants, et les deux
roses trempées dans un verre, au milieu de la table étroite ; tout,
jusqu’à la petite servante aux joues rubicondes et aux mains
maladroites qui tournait autour d’eux.
Ils déjeunèrent devant une fenêtre large ouverte sur le jardinet
qui rappelait la guinguette des environs de Paris avec sa tonnelle
ronde au fond et ses berceaux de verdure.
Tonnelle et berceaux étaient heureusement vides. Ils ne se
remplissaient que le dimanche.
Au delà du petit mur qui encerclait le jardin, la vue s’étendait sur
l’admirable vallée. Au premier plan le village de Vaux, dont les
maisons groupées pittoresquement entouraient le clocher.
Ce fut un gai déjeuner rempli d’incidents imprévus. Des poules
entrant sans façon pour venir picorer les miettes sur la robe de
Diane ; un papillon que Jacques réussit à attraper et piquer malgré
les protestations de sa sœur. Puis, la mère Hippolyte en personne
sortant de sa cuisine entre chaque service, s’essuyant les doigts à
son tablier bleu pour venir quêter quelques compliments sur sa
cuisine.
— Eh ben, mon officier ? et vous, madame, et vous le p’tit jeune
homme ? Qu’est-ce que vous en dites de mon lapin sauté ? hein ?
On irait loin pour manger le pareil !
Et mon p’tit vin blanc ? Y s’laisse boire !
Allez ! faut pas vous gêner ! Il n’est point méchant. Y en a d’autre
à la cave…
Marie, tu remonteras deux bouteilles… du bon, tu sais, les
militaires, faut pas les attraper…
Allons, s’pèce d’engourdie ! R’mue-toi, et pus vite que ça !…
Excusez, messieurs, madame ; à c’t’ âge-là, ça n’a que l’amour en
tête ! Ah ! jeunesse !
Avec des clins d’œil rieur du côté des jeunes gens, la mère
Hippolyte repartait à petits pas, toute sa forte poitrine secouée de
rires et répétant :
— Ah ! c’te jeunesse ! Toutes les mêmes ! Allez, allez ! ça y
passera avant que ça me r’prenne !
Le repas terminé par un café exécrable, Jacques sortit afin de
faire seller les chevaux pendant que sa sœur s’apprêtait.
Debout devant la glace pendue au-dessus de la cheminée,
Diane, les bras levés, remettait son chapeau et son voile.
De loin, Hervé suivait ses mouvements. Il s’avisa que la jeune
fille avait laissé ses gants et sa cravache sur une chaise à l’entrée
de la salle ; il alla les prendre.
De l’endroit où elle était, Diane suivait ses mouvements dans la
glace tout en continuant à causer.
Elle le vit revenir vers elle, lentement, en retournant les gants
entre ses doigts avec délicatesse, puis… (Était-ce pour sentir l’odeur
dont ils étaient parfumés ?) il les porta très vite à sa bouche en lui
jetant un regard furtif et il s’approcha…
Diane avait saisi le geste étrange ; cependant elle ne se retourna
pas et dit d’une voix tranquille, continuant la conversation du
dessert :
— Vous ne voyez pas le moyen de renvoyer votre Farfadet en
Bretagne sans y aller vous-même ?
— Cela serait possible ; mais, de toutes façons, il est préférable
que j’y aille moi-même. J’ai plusieurs affaires à régler avec mes
fermiers.
Il ajouta plus bas, avec un accent pénétré :
— Oui, cette promenade est la dernière que je fais avec vous…
Ayant pris ses gants, elle les boutonna lentement, toujours
tournée vers la glace.
Elle eut l’idée d’y jeter un coup d’œil.
Elle rencontra alors le regard de Kéravan fixé sur elle avec une
intense et douloureuse expression. Regret, douleur, tendresse… Il y
avait tout cela ! A cette minute, Diane se sentit pénétrée de la
conviction absolue qu’il l’aimait… comme elle avait longtemps
désespéré d’être aimée…
Puis, une réflexion traversa son esprit :
« Il m’aime, mais il n’osera jamais me le dire. »
Elle se retourna très calme, puis, prenant sa cravache :
— Venez, dit-elle. J’entends les chevaux ; ils doivent être prêts.
A plusieurs reprises, pendant le cours de l’après-midi, Jacques
remarqua que sa sœur avait des distractions ; elle ne parlait plus
avec sa gaieté légère du matin, ou bien elle arrêtait souvent ses
yeux sur leur compagnon et l’examinait avec attention.
Le lieutenant devait faire effort sur lui-même pour soutenir la
conversation au diapason du matin ; mais, à mesure que les heures
passaient, sa mélancolie naturelle reprenait le dessus.
Somme toute, cette belle partie, commencée avec un joyeux
entrain, s’acheva dans une impression de tristesse à laquelle le
prochain départ de l’officier pouvait servir de prétexte.
Ils rentrèrent à Paris par le dernier train. Avant de se séparer de
ses compagnons, l’officier promit d’aller faire ses adieux durant son
court passage à Paris entre ses deux voyages… Et ils se
séparèrent.
Le lendemain, dans le wagon qui l’emportait vers la Bretagne,
Hervé de Kéravan repassait de souvenir les semaines qui venaient
de s’écouler… ces jours rapides, si vite passés, qui, à ce qu’il lui
semblait, avaient bouleversé toute sa vie !
Trois visions familières prenaient tour à tour possession de son
esprit au point qu’il ne pouvait s’en détacher.
C’était Diane dans les attitudes et les situations où quelque
aspect nouveau de la jeune fille l’avait frappé.
Diane, chez elle, pendant cette soirée de mai avec sa robe
blanche aux mouvements onduleux, sa taille gracieuse, et le sourire
qu’elle avait en disant : « Il faudra revenir » et encore, pendant la
même soirée, quand il avait ressenti les premiers symptômes de son
amour, la voix enchanteresse au timbre si pur qui, par une
coïncidence étrange, lui avait pour ainsi dire tracé sa ligne de
conduite… Comme Fortunio, il savait que son secret ne dépasserait
jamais ses lèvres, dût-il en mourir !
Il voyait encore Diane à l’hôpital, sa face pâle, ses grands yeux
rayonnants d’une douce pitié, et l’air dont elle lui avait dit : « Plus
leurs plaies sont hideuses, plus ils ont le droit d’en être fiers ! »
Si jamais il devait revenir, comme ce pauvre Jacquet, défiguré ou
mutilé, daignerait-elle jeter encore un regard sur lui ?
Il se répondait « oui », car il la croyait aussi noble et aussi bonne
qu’elle était belle.
Mais, hélas ! ce n’était point sa pitié qu’il eût convoitée…
C’était enfin Diane insouciante et gaie, la veille, dans la forêt, ou
encore à la petite table du déjeuner avec son visage animé, le rire
fusant de ses lèvres ouvertes et ce rayon de soleil filtrant à travers
les branches qui mettait des tons chauds sur ses cheveux bruns.
Ces trois silhouettes, d’abord distinctes, finirent par se confondre
et il s’endormit croyant voir devant lui le sourire énigmatique de
l’amazone telle qu’il l’avait rencontrée pour la première fois.
Hervé revint à Paris deux jours plus tard, rompu de fatigue, ayant
passé le temps à se promener dans ses terres dont il avait constaté
le triste abandon et à écouter les doléances des fermières qui, en
l’absence de leurs maris, déclaraient ne pouvoir payer leurs
fermages.
Pourtant il recueillit une somme suffisante pour solder le compte
arriéré de ses loyers et, aussitôt de retour à Paris, il l’envoya au
gérant de la marquise de Trivières.
Hervé ne voulait plus revoir celle qui occupait ses pensées.
Il avait trop rêvé de son image durant sa courte absence ; il ne se
sentait plus assez sûr de lui-même, plus assez certain qu’en sa
présence rien ne trahît ses sentiments.
Ayant vu Mlle de Trivières traverser le jardin accompagnée de
son frère, et ayant entendu résonner sous la voûte le roulement de
l’auto, il se présenta à l’hôtel et laissa sa carte au bas de laquelle il
griffonna quelques mots de regrets et d’adieu…
Le soir, en rentrant, Mlle de Trivières reçut cette carte qu’elle
examina longuement.
Puis la jeune fille monta chez elle, très vite.
Elle ouvrit un tiroir de son petit bureau où elle prit une lettre
ouverte et, debout auprès de l’embrasure de la fenêtre, elle compara
longuement les deux écritures : celle de la lettre et celle de la carte
d’Hervé de Kéravan.
Elle murmura :
— C’est étrange ! Je n’aurais pas cru qu’il fût possible de trouver
deux écritures se ressemblant autant !
CHAPITRE IV
Feu le marquis de Trivières avait fait élever, à deux ou trois

kilomètres de son château de Vauclair, un chalet au milieu des bois.
C’était un rendez-vous de chasse où il aimait quelquefois réunir ses
amis, les nemrods de la contrée. Sa fille ayant toujours montré une
prédilection pour cette demeure champêtre, d’ailleurs admirablement
située, une clause du testament du marquis l’en avait instituée
légataire.
A partir de cet été, où elle atteignait sa majorité, la jeune fille
devenait la maîtresse incontestée de la Biche-au-Bois. A peine
arrivée à Vauclair, elle s’ouvrit à sa mère de son désir d’installer
dans son petit domaine le siège de plusieurs œuvres qu’elle désirait
fonder. Il y aurait de la place, en haut, en abattant quelques cloisons,
pour une quinzaine de lits, et l’hôpital de Bonnétable, le gros bourg
le plus rapproché, serait heureux d’y envoyer des convalescents ;
plus tard, on ferait venir des petits orphelins. Enfin, la grande salle
du bas servirait d’ouvroir et les femmes du pays pourraient y venir
travailler. Le curé de Vauclair, venu saluer les châtelaines,
s’intéressa aux projets charitables de Diane. Par son entremise, on
vit bientôt arriver à la Biche-au-Bois des convalescents, des
ouvrières et des religieuses dont le dévouement fut fort apprécié. La
marquise de Trivières donnait à sa fille le concours de sa fortune et
de ses relations dans le pays.
Dans l’ouvroir de la Biche-au-Bois, six heures du soir. Les
ouvrières sont parties.
Mlle de Trivières termine des comptes devant un bureau ; Rose
Perrin fait des reprises dans des chemises de soldats.
Une jeune religieuse compte des serviettes qu’elle empile sur
une longue table.
Mlle de Trivières s’informe sans tourner la tête.
— Rose, le facteur est-il passé ?
— Oui, mademoiselle. Il y en avait une pour Ramée, une pour
Graindor, une autre pour la sœur Philomène et une pour moi, que je
ne connais pas. Mais sûrement ce n’est pas celle que mademoiselle
veut dire…
— Laissez vos reprises, Rose, et lisez votre lettre. Six heures ont
sonné, c’est le temps du repos.
— Je n’ose pas, mademoiselle. Si c’était une mauvaise
nouvelle ?
— Allons ! vous êtes par trop enfant ! Lisez-la, et ne restez pas
dans le courant d’air.
— Oh ! mademoiselle, avec la santé que j’ai maintenant, courant
d’air ou pas courant d’air, c’est tout comme ! Mais, si mademoiselle
voulait bien la lire, ou bien vous, ma sœur des Anges, j’aurais plus
de courage pour écouter…
Une voix claire, celle de sœur des Anges.
— Si cela vous fait plaisir, mademoiselle Rose, je lirai.
La sœur décachète l’enveloppe avec de petits mouvements nets,
proprement, et lit :
« Mademoiselle Perrin,
« La présente est pour vous apprendre en douceur, comme il me
l’a bien recommandé, que votre filleul et ami Plisson Victor, de la
quatrième, vient d’être gravement blessé… »
— Oh ! mon Dieu ! Qu’est-ce que je disais ? Continuez, ma sœur.
— On lui a coupé la jambe hier, la gauche, ça s’est très bien
passé ; il avait reçu dedans un éclat d’obus dans le gras de la… »
Lisez, mademoiselle Rose, il y a un mot…
— « De la cuisse ! » Ah ! mon pauvre Victor ! Ensuite, ma sœur ?
Est-ce qu’il donne des détails ?

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The New Behaviorism Foundations of

Behavioral Science 3rd Edition John

Foundations of Behavioral Neuroscience 10th Edition

Foundations of Python Network Programming 3rd Edition

Foundations of Python Network Programming 3rd Edition

Foundations of Python Network Programming 3rd Edition

Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical

Clinical Psychology for Trainees: Foundations of

Foundations of Hyperbolic Manifolds Third Edition 3rd

Foundations of Marketing 7th Edition John Fahy

“Behaviorism is a distinctive and elegant philosophy of social science, and

“The New Behaviorism is quite brilliant: It is frankly the only behaviorism

“I started John Staddon’s book on behaviorism at a fast clip, as befts a reader

This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along

John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of

Preface to the Third Edition xi

1 The Psychology of the “Other One” 3

19 Law, Punishment, and Behaviorism 259

The New Behaviorism describes a philosophical and empirical foundation for

Behaviorism was once a dominant force in American psychology. It led to

Box 1.1 Weber-Fechner and Expected Utility

The Weber–Fechner Law

The Weber–Fechner relation is a matter of fact. But Fechner went beyond

I have . . . used a parliamentary metaphor to characterize the confron­

In a critical comment on English biologist J. S. Kennedy’s behavioristically

If anthropomorphism produces results that are, in the normal manner of

As recently as 1999, a philosopher blessed with the gift of prophecy could

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the inferential nature of perception

Many less superstitious mathematicians report similar experiences. J. E.

There was a moment on University Challenge [a UK TV quiz pro­

So wrote a British TV quiz contestant a few years ago.21

Box 1.2 Watson on Behaviorism

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experi­

and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its

Watson wanted his science to be objective. The idea of objectivity, defned

Since psychology was at one time defned as the study of conscious­

If the followers of the Freudian school of psychologists can be

Cognitive psychologists are interested in thought, but behaviorists are con­

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Loeb and Tropisms

Figure 2.1 Tumble-and-swim orientation. A cone of nutrient concentration peaks at the

Box 2.1 Lateral Inhibition

To illustrate the principle of lateral inhibition the x-axis shows sixteen

where IN is the stimulus to cell N , x N is the response of cell N and k

A mechanism in the abstract sense of a rule of operation may turn out to

Box 2.2 The Law of Efect

Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are

Why did Thorndike do his experiments in William James’s basement

Box 2.3 The Varieties of Behaviorism

There is no generally agreed classifcation, and some would add to or

CLASSICAL: The behaviorism of Watson; the objective study of

NEO-BEHAVIORISM: Hullian and post-Hullian, theoretical,

Some of Hull’s theoretical elements were drawn from Pavlov, many of

Si vous croyez que je vais dire

Au milieu du silence de la nuit, les paroles arrivaient, distinctes.

Et je veux mourir pour ma mie

Hervé de Kéravan poussa un profond soupir.

Mourir pour sa mie

A l’heure convenue, Mlle de Trivières et son frère descendaient

Feu le marquis de Trivières avait fait élever, à deux ou trois

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