Life's Pleasures Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike is doing something sly here: he strips the animal mind down to a blank stage so the new protagonist can enter - behavior, measurable and repeatable. The drumbeat of negation ("no reasoning, no process... no thinking... no ideas") reads like a manifesto disguised as observation. It is less a neutral description than a boundary line: whatever happens in the puzzle box, Thorndike insists, is not the kind of thinking humans like to congratulate themselves for. That rhetorical severity matters because it protects his central claim that learning is incremental and mechanical, built from trial-and-error and reinforcement rather than flashes of insight.

The subtext is a culture war inside early psychology. In the late 19th and early 20th century, "animal intelligence" was being narrated by anecdote and wishful anthropomorphism. Thorndike answers with apparatus, timing, and the tight language of laboratory control. By denying "inference or comparison", he also denies the authority of introspection as a method: you cannot crawl inside the cat's head, so stop pretending you can.

There's an ethical chill to the phrasing, too. "The animal does not think" is not just a scientific claim; it's a permission structure. If the creature is reduced to stimulus and response, the box becomes a legitimate theater of manipulation, not a moral problem. Thorndike's intent is to make psychology harder-edged and more predictive, but the cost is a deliberately narrowed account of mind - one that will shape behaviorism's rise, and the long argument over whether intelligence is what we can measure or what we can imagine.