ABSTRACT
Between them, E. L. Thorndike and I. P. Pavlov contributed important methods to psychology, methods that were to become the experimental mainstays of behaviorism. At the same time, each questioned the need for psychologists and biologists to talk about animal mind. Thorndike found only blind association forming in his animals, denying that animals reason or even imitate. Pavlov, following Sechenov, proposed to substitute physiology for psychology, eliminating talk about the mind for talk about the brain. Along with the rest of psychology, the discussion of behaviorism was interrupted by World War I. Psychology was much changed by its involvement with the war; when psychologists resumed their consideration of behaviorism, the grounds of the discussion were quite different from what they had been before the war. The value of objective psychology had been proved by the tests psychologists had devised to classify soldiers, and that success had brought psychology before a wider audience.
