Science & Tech Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike’s line is a small manifesto disguised as a definition. By calling psychology “the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man,” he drags the human mind off its philosophical pedestal and drops it into the same investigable world as pigeons, cats, and rats. The phrasing matters: “animals including man” doesn’t just broaden the subject; it demotes the species. It signals a refusal to treat human consciousness as sacred, special, or exempt from measurement.

The intent is disciplinary, almost political. In Thorndike’s era, psychology was still negotiating its identity against introspection-heavy traditions and moralistic theories of “character.” He keeps the old vocabulary (“intellects,” “characters”) but yokes it to “science,” implying that even the messiest parts of personhood can be studied with the same rigor as anything in biology. The subtext is methodological: if humans are animals, then controlled experiments, comparative studies, and observable outcomes aren’t crude substitutes for understanding; they are the route to it.

This is also the early 20th-century American confidence project in miniature: take what sounds like ineffable inner life and make it legible, predictable, and useful. Thorndike’s work in learning theory and educational measurement sits behind the sentence like a blueprint. If behavior and intellect are continuous across species, then learning can be engineered, standardized, optimized. That promise is the power of the quote, and also its quiet warning: once “character” becomes data, it becomes something institutions will try to manage.