Nature & Animals Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike is taking a polite swing at an older intellectual habit: treating the mind as something you can only study through what people can report about themselves. That “restriction” to conscious states sounds narrow because it is. In late-19th-century psychology, introspection carried prestige; it also quietly fenced off whole domains of behavior that didn’t come with a verbal transcript. Animals, infants, even much of adult habit and skill became second-class citizens in a science that privileged the speakable.

The sentence’s craft is its understatement. “Not without influence” is academic restraint masking a sharper point: if you insist that psychology is the study of consciousness, then animal psychology becomes either impossible or forced into flimsy guesswork. You end up projecting human-like feelings onto animals (“the dog is jealous”) because you have no sanctioned way to talk about learning as observable change. Thorndike is signaling a pivot away from that cul-de-sac.

Subtextually, he’s also legitimizing his own program. Thorndike’s puzzle-box experiments and “law of effect” helped build behaviorism’s early foundations: a psychology grounded in measurable actions and consequences, not private experience. By framing human psychology’s introspective bias as shaping animal research, he implies that methodological choices are political choices inside a discipline: define the mind as consciousness and you crown the talkers; define it as learning and you can finally treat animals as proper scientific subjects.

Context matters because it’s a transitional moment. Thorndike writes at the hinge where psychology starts shedding philosophy’s parlor tools and building lab instruments. This line reads like a quiet manifesto for that turn.