ABSTRACT
Under the powerful influences of Watson and Pavlov, the distinguishing characteristic of contemporary psychology has come to be emphasis upon behaviour. Behaviourism has modified the methods and approach even of other schools whose interest has been primarily phenomenological. The ‘objective’ approach has come to be acknowledged as essential to scientific method in the subject; the practice of writers to generalize from their own introspective experience is no longer in evidence, and introspective methods, when they are used, are carefully controlled and correlated with observed behaviour. On the other hand, with the passage of time, and the impact of widespread criticism, 1 features of behaviouristic theory which originally made it distinctive have been largely abandoned. Its mechanistic and atomistic excesses have been mitigated, allowance has been made for the patterning of stimuli, for motivation and for the occurrence of awareness (always tacitly assumed in one way or another), if only as intervening variables between stimulus and response; and the behaviour, of which psychology is now regarded as the special science, is recognized as something more than ordinarily complicated.
