Edward Thorndike Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

Edward Thorndike
When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements.

Edward Thorndike
The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

Edward Thorndike
The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

Edward Thorndike
Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.

Edward Thorndike
Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine.

Edward Thorndike
Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

Edward Thorndike
On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character

Edward Thorndike
Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.

Edward Thorndike
To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.

Edward Thorndike
The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.

Edward Thorndike