Nature & Animals Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike is drawing a bright, almost defiant line between two kinds of claims psychologists make: the animal as a felt experience and the animal as an observable machine of habits. The phrasing is clinical, but the subtext is a methodological power play. By splitting “what he is to himself” from “what he is an outside observer,” Thorndike is staking the discipline’s credibility on the latter. Inner life is granted as a category, then quietly quarantined.

Context matters: Thorndike helped build early American experimental psychology at a moment when introspection was losing its grip and behaviorism was about to become the house style. His puzzle-box experiments with cats and his “law of effect” made learning look like something you could measure, graph, and replicate. The quote reads like scaffolding for that shift. If you want psychology to be a science with lab authority, you privilege statements that survive outside observation; you treat reports of consciousness as messy, private, and politically vulnerable to charges of metaphysics.

The intent isn’t simply to deny consciousness. It’s to sort statements by evidentiary status. “Original and acquired ways of response” signals a program: innate reflexes plus learned behaviors, both legible to instruments and experimenters. Calling behavior “what he is an outside observer” also reveals the era’s blind spot: the animal becomes an object whose meaning is produced by someone watching. Thorndike’s tidy dichotomy is persuasive because it offers a bargain - trade the unruly drama of inner life for the hard currency of measurement.