Nature & Animals Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike’s line lands with the cold confidence of a new kind of authority: the laboratory-backed psychologist explaining the animal mind by reducing it to wiring. The phrasing is doing more than describing dogs; it’s staking a claim about what counts as intelligence. “Few or no ideas” isn’t an observation so much as a boundary marker. If an animal can’t demonstrate cognition in the ways an experiment can measure, Thorndike implies, then cognition effectively isn’t there.

The subtext is behaviorism-in-the-making: mind as mechanism, thought as the byproduct of “connections” between processes. Thorndike’s era was enthralled by industrial metaphors - efficiency, machinery, systems - and psychology was busy separating itself from philosophy and introspection. Calling the dog’s brain “coarse” frames animal behavior as crude stimulus-response, a neat justification for focusing on observable learning rather than messy inner experience. It’s also rhetorically savvy: “on the other hand” suggests he’s already contrasted the human mind as refined, dense with associations, culturally and biologically “advanced.”

What makes it work is its blunt hierarchy. It reassures readers that human specialness is scientific, not sentimental, while quietly naturalizing a ladder of minds that can spill over into how we talk about “lower” humans, too. From today’s vantage point - with evidence of canine social cognition, memory, and emotion - the certainty reads less like fact than like methodological overreach. Thorndike isn’t just describing dogs; he’s describing the limits of the tools he trusts.