Nature & Animals Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike is drawing a hard line between raw stimulus-response behavior and the newer, more ambitious claim that minds can decompose experience. In his hands, “the animal way” isn’t an insult so much as a baseline: the creature that learns by simple association, by stamping in whatever “worked” last time. The pivot comes with “think the situation out,” a phrase that sneaks in an entire research program. Thought isn’t presented as airy reasoning; it’s re-described as a rearrangement of feelings into parts.

That’s the sly subtext: cognition, for Thorndike, is not a separate ghostly faculty. It’s an internal inventory of “particular feelings” tied to the elements of a scene. Break the situation into components, feel those components distinctly, and you get something that starts to look like insight without invoking anything mystical. He’s smuggling introspection into the language of mechanism, making thought legible to measurement and, crucially, to education.

The context matters. Thorndike was a key architect of early 20th-century psychology’s turn toward learning theory, where the lab animal and the classroom child became parallel problems. This sentence defends that bridge: humans aren’t exempt from associative learning, but they can refine it by parsing situations more finely. It also telegraphs a quiet polemic against romantic notions of “reason” as pure logic. For Thorndike, thinking is the feeling of structure. That framing helped justify a century of schooling and testing built on the idea that complex performance can be engineered by training the right elements, in the right combinations, until “thought” becomes a reproducible skill.