“Any other questions?” A young man Watson recognized from a previous class raised his hand, and Watson nodded in his direction.

“How will we be able to understand the people we visit?”

“Excellent question, Mark. Would you believe it’s as simple as a pill? Before we go to Germany in the 19th century, for example, I’ll give us each a tablet that’ll rearrange synaptic connections in key language areas so that, for a half hour or so, we’ll all be able to understand 19th-century German. After that, the connections revert to their normal positions. Any other questions?”

This time no one raised a hand, so Watson continued. “First, I’m going to give you a little background, and then we’ll take a few short jaunts into the philosophical part of psychology’s past. I’m going to start with a famous quote by one of psychology’s pioneers, Hermann Ebbinghaus. In one of his introductory psychology textbooks, Ebbinghaus wrote, ‘Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.’ What he meant was that throughout recorded history people have been interested in psychological topics and ideas, but psychology as a separate science has a short history. Of course, psychology’s history was much shorter when Ebbinghaus wrote the line than it is today, but it’s still the case that psychology is one of the youngest of the sciences.” Watson thought of telling the students that Ebbinghaus’s history was almost over when he wrote the line in 1908, as he died of pneumonia the following year. But he would have had to explain too much, beginning with pneumonia, which hadn’t been experienced by anyone on Earth in more than a century.