"For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals"
About this Quote
Thorndike is smuggling a quiet revolution into a plainspoken sentence: if you want to understand what makes the human mind “human,” stop treating it as a special case. Look down the evolutionary ladder, at animals learning through association, and you’ll find the scaffolding of our own abilities. The provocation isn’t just scientific; it’s cultural. In a period still haunted by Victorian hierarchies and soul-talk, he pushes cognition out of the parlor and into the lab, where behavior can be observed, measured, and reproduced.
The intent is methodological and political in the academic sense: legitimize psychology as an empirical science by anchoring it in mechanisms that are visible in “lower animals.” That phrase carries the era’s blunt taxonomy, but it also serves his argument. If even creatures we patronize can acquire new behaviors through association, then human “faculty” starts to look less like a divine endowment and more like an elaboration of basic learning rules.
The subtext is an early behaviorist gambit: mental life becomes secondary to what can be tested. Thorndike’s famous puzzle-box experiments with cats weren’t cute demonstrations; they were a claim that intelligence can be decomposed into stimulus, response, and reinforcement. “Origin and development” signals a Darwinian posture too: the mind is not a finished essence but a product with a history.
In context, Thorndike is writing into the rise of experimental psychology and education reform. If human capacities are built from associative processes, then schooling, training, and social policy can be engineered around reinforcement rather than moral exhortation. That’s the line’s lasting power and its uneasy shadow: it makes learning measurable, and it makes minds manipulable.
The intent is methodological and political in the academic sense: legitimize psychology as an empirical science by anchoring it in mechanisms that are visible in “lower animals.” That phrase carries the era’s blunt taxonomy, but it also serves his argument. If even creatures we patronize can acquire new behaviors through association, then human “faculty” starts to look less like a divine endowment and more like an elaboration of basic learning rules.
The subtext is an early behaviorist gambit: mental life becomes secondary to what can be tested. Thorndike’s famous puzzle-box experiments with cats weren’t cute demonstrations; they were a claim that intelligence can be decomposed into stimulus, response, and reinforcement. “Origin and development” signals a Darwinian posture too: the mind is not a finished essence but a product with a history.
In context, Thorndike is writing into the rise of experimental psychology and education reform. If human capacities are built from associative processes, then schooling, training, and social policy can be engineered around reinforcement rather than moral exhortation. That’s the line’s lasting power and its uneasy shadow: it makes learning measurable, and it makes minds manipulable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Edward
Add to List
