The Ghost in the Machine Read Online Free PDF

and sentiments -- with the
opposite fallacy: denying man faculties not found in lower animals;
it has substituted for the erstwhile anthropomorphic view of the rat,
a ratomorphic view of man. It has even re-named psychology, because it
was derived from the Greek word for 'mind', and called it the 'science
of behaviour'. It was a demonstrative act of semantic self-castration,
in keeping with Skinner's references to education as 'behavioural
engineering'. Its declared aim, 'to predict and to control human activity
as physical scientists control and manipulate other natural phenomena'
[24], sounds as nasty as it is naive. Werner Heisenberg, one of the
greatest living physical scientists, has laconically declared: 'Nature
is unpredictable'; it seems rather absurd to deny the living organism
even that degree of unpredictability which quantum physics accords to
inanimate nature.
     
     
Behaviourism has dominated the stage throughout the dark ages of
psychology, and is still, in the 1960s, dominant in our universities;
but it never had the stage all to itself. In the first place there have
always been 'voices in the wilderness', mostly belonging to an older
generation which had come to maturity before the Great Purge. In the
second place, there was Gestalt psychology, which at one time looked like
a serious rival to Behaviourism. But the great expectations which the
Gestalt school aroused were only partly fulfilled, and its limitations
soon became apparent. The Behaviourists managed to incorporate some
of their opponents' experimental results into their own theories,
and continued to hold the stage. The interested reader can find this
controversy outlined in The Act of Creation , and there is no need to
go into it here.* But the net result was a kind of abortive Renaissance
followed by a Counter-Reformation. Lastly, to round off the picture,
there is a younger generation of neurophysiologists and communication
theorists who regard orthodox S-R psychology as senile, but are often
forced to pay lip-service to it, if they want to get on in their academic
careers and get their papers published in the tight sort of technical
journal -- and who become in varying degrees infected in the process by
the doctrines of flat-earth psychology.
     
* Particularly in Book Two, Chapter Twelve, 'The Pitfalls of Learning
     Theory', and Chapter Thirteen, 'The Pitfalls of Gestalt'.
     
It is impossible to arrive at a diagnosis of man's predicament --
and by implication at a therapy -- by starting from a psychology which
denies the existence of mind, and lives on specious analogies derived
from the bar-pressing activities of rats. The record of fifty years of
ratomorphic psychology is comparable in its sterile pedantry to that of
scholasticism in its period of decline, when it had fallen to counting
angels on pin-heads -- although this sounds a more attractive pastime
than counting the number of bar-pressings in the box.
     
     
     
     
     
II
     
     
THE CHAIN OF WORDS AND THE TREE OF LANGUAGE
     
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to
    speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

    Oscar Wilde
     
The emergence of symbolic language, first spoken, then written, represents
the sharpest break between animal and man. Many social animals have some
system of communication by signs and signals, but language is a
species-specific, exclusive property of man. Even 'mongolian' idiots,
incapable of looking after themselves in the most primitive ways, are
capable of acquiring the rudiments of symbolic speech but not dolphins
and chimpanzees, highly intelligent as they are in other respects. Nor
rats and pigeons.
     
     
Language, then, one would expect, is a phenomenon whose study more than
any other would show up the absurdity of the ratomorphic approach. It not
only does that; it also provides the best opportunity for introducing,
by way of contrast, some of the basic concepts of the new synthesis in
the making. This contrast between the