Edward L. Thorndike

“ Thousands of cats on thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the representative of the cat-mind in all the books. The unconscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal’s mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous. ”

“ If by the pain we must mean the pain as felt by some one, then by the sun we can mean only the sun as seen by some one. Pain and sun are equally subjects for a science of ‘consciousness as such.’ But if by the sun is meant the sun of common sense, physics and astronomy, the sun as known by any one, then by the pain we can mean the pain of medicine, economics and sociology, the pain as known by any one, and by the sufferer long after he was or had it. ”

“ The first great question is whether or not animals are ever led to do any of their acts by reasoning. Do they ever conclude from inference that a certain act will produce a certain desired result, and so do it? The best opinion has been that they do not. The best interpretation of even the most extraordinary performances of animals has been that they were the result of accident and association or imitation. But it has after all been only opinion and interpretation, and the opposite theory persistently reappears in the literature of the subject. ”

“ Nowhere in the animal kingdom do we find the psychological elements of reasoning save where there is a mental life made up of the definite feelings which I have called ‘ideas,’ but they spring up like magic as soon as we get in a child a body of such ideas. If we have traced satisfactorily the evolution of a life of ideas from the animal life of vague sense-impressions and impulses, we may be reasonably sure that no difficulty awaits us in following the life of ideas in its course from the chaotic dream of early childhood to the logical world-view of the adult scientist. ”

“ Our attention to the other player and the ball in a game of tennis is like the animal’s attention, but our attention to a passage in Hegel, or the memory which flits through our mind, or the song we hear, or the player we idly watch, is not. ”

“ Does the kitten feel “sound of call, memory-image of milk in a saucer in the kitchen, thought of running into the house, a feeling, finally, of ‘I will run in’”? Does he perhaps feel only the sound of the bell and an impulse to run in, similar in quality to the impulses which make a tennis player run to and fro when playing? The word ‘association’ may cover a multitude of essentially different processes, and when a writer attributes anything that an animal may do to association, his statement has only the negative value of eliminating reasoning on the one hand and instinct on the other. ”

“ Complexity of Associations
An important question, especially if one wishes to rate an animal on a scale of intelligence, is the question of how complex an association it can form. A man can learn that to open a door he has to put the key in its hole, turn it, turn the knob, and pull the door. Here, then, is a complex act connected with the simple sense-impression. Or, conversely, a man knows that when the ringing of a bell is followed by a whistle and that by a red light he is to do a certain thing, while if any of the three happens alone, he is not to. ”

“ There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas—the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. He simply comes after the learning to feel like doing a certain thing under certain circumstances which before the learning he did not feel like doing. 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. ”

“ The cat who reacts to a loop of small wire of a blue color knows just what that loop is, and when it sees a different loop, knows its differences, but knows also its likeness, and reacts to the essential. Thus crediting the cat with our differentiation and perception of individuality, they credit it with our conceptions and perceptions of similarity. Unless the animal has the first, there is no reason to suppose the last. ”

“ The original tendencies to connect certain thoughts, feelings and acts with certain situations—tendencies which we call reflexes, instincts and capacities—are not themselves states of consciousness; nor are the acquired connections which we call habits, associations of ideas, tendencies to attend, select and the like. No state of consciousness bears within itself an account of when and how it will appear, or of what bodily act will be its sequel. What any given person will think in any given situation is unpredictable by mere descriptions and analyses of his previous thoughts each by itself. ”

“ In acts of reasoning man has been supposed to connect with a given situation a response that could never have been predicted merely from knowledge of what responses were connected with that situation by his original nature or had been connected with it by the laws of exercise and effect. Inference has been supposed to create bonds in and of itself and to be above the mere laws of habit. ”

“ It is the actual delights that hold him, the actual discomforts that check him, and the only way to be sure that he will get up is so to arrange matters that it is more satisfactory to him to get up than not to when the situation, whatever it be, that is to suggest that response, makes its appearance.
The experience of every schoolroom shows that it is not enough to get the idea of an act. ”

“ One makes use of no feelings of a common element, no perceptions of similarity. The tennis player does not feel, “This ball coming at this angle and with this speed is similar in angle, though not in speed, to that other ball of an hour ago, therefore I will hit it in a similar way.” He simply feels an impulse from the sense-impression. Finally, the elements of the associations are not isolated. No tennis player’s stream of thought is filled with free-floating representations of any of the tens of thousands of sense-impressions or movements he has seen and made on the tennis court. ”

“ If a cat pushes a button around with its nose, while its main occupation, the act to which its general ‘set’ impels it, to which, we say, it is chiefly attentive, is that of clawing at an opening, it will be less aided in the formation of the habit than if it had been chiefly concerned in what its nose was doing. The successful response is as a rule only a part of all that the animal is doing at the time. In proportion as it is an eminent, emphatic part of it, learning is aided. ”

“ One of the lower animals is so obviously a bundle of original and acquired connections between situation and response that the student is led to attend to the whole series,—situation, response and connection or bond,—rather than to just the conscious state that may or may not be one of the features of the bond. It is so useful, in understanding the animal, to see what it does in different circumstances and what helps and what hinders its learning, that one is led to an intrinsic interest in varieties of behavior as well as in the kinds of consciousness of which they give evidence. ”

“ Imagine a man thrown into the water repeatedly, and gradually floundering to the shore in better and better style until finally, when thrown in, he swims off perfectly, and deprive the man of all extraneous feelings, and you have an approximate homologue of the process in animals. He feels discomfort, certain impulses to flounder around, some of which are the right ones to move his body to the shore. The pleasure which follows stamps in these, and gradually the proper movements are made immediately on feeling the sense-impression of surrounding water. ”

“ So much for the anecdote school, if it calls itself by its right name and pretends only to give an abnormal animal psychology. The sad fact has been that it has always pushed forward these exceptions as the essential phenomena of animal mind. It has built up a general psychology from abnormal data. It is like an anatomy written from observations on dime-museum freaks. ”

“ It is true that by an animal’s behavior one means the facts about the animal that are left over after geometry, physics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology have taken their toll, and that are not already well looked after by sociology, economics, history, esthetics and other sciences dealing with certain complex and specialized facts of behavior. It is true that the boundaries of psychology, from physiology on the one hand, and from sociology, economics and the like on the other, become dubious and changeable. ”

“ Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. When we learn to drive a golf ball or play tennis or billiards, when we learn to tell the price of tea by tasting it or to strike a certain note exactly with the voice, we do not learn in the main by virtue of any ideas that are explained to us, by any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the gradual selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its association with the circumstances or situation requiring it, in just the way that the animals do. ”

“ Association in animals does not equal association in man. The latter is built over and permeated and transformed by inference and judgment and comparison; it includes imitation in our narrow sense of transferred association; it obtains where no impulse is included; it thus takes frequently the form of long trains of thought ending in no pleasure-giving act; its elements are often loose, existing independently of the particular association; the association is not only thought, but at the same time thought about. None of these statements may be truthfully made of animal association. ”

“ No one should pretend to have disproved direct imitation in the case of learning to talk until he has subjected all these and other matters to crucial experiments. But the burden of proof does seem to belong upon those who deny the adequacy of the laws of exercise and effect. In so far as the choice is between accepting or rejecting a general law that, other things being equal, the perception of a response in another produces that response, we surely must reject it. ”

“ If the animal realizes the mental states of the other animal who before his eyes pulls the string, goes out through the door, and eats fish, he ought to form the association, ‘impulse to pull string, pleasure of eating fish.’ This we saw the animal could not do.
In fact, pleasure in another, pain in another, is not a sense-presentation or a representation or feeling of an object of any sort, but rather a ‘meaning,’ a feeling ‘of the fact that.’ It can exist only as something thought about. ”

“ It is incredible that the neurone-action corresponding to the perception of a response in another, or to the idea of a response in oneself, or to the first term in an association by similarity, should have, in and of itself, a special power to determine that the next neurone-action should be that paralleling the response in question. ”

“ If a modern psychologist defines mind as the sum total of consciousness, and lives up to that definition, he omits the larger portion of the task of his predecessors. To define our subject-matter as the nature and behavior of men, beginning where anatomy and physiology leave off, is, on the contrary, to deliberately assume responsibility for the entire heritage. Behavior includes consciousness and action, states of mind and their connections. ”

“ Now, if a bird really gets a sound in his mind from hearing it and sets out forthwith to imitate it, as mocking birds are said at times to do, it is a mystery and deserves closest study. If a bird, out of a lot of random noises that it makes, chooses those for repetition which are like sounds that he has heard, it is again a mystery why, though not as in the previous case a mystery how, he does it. The important fact for our purpose is that, though the imitation of sounds is so habitual, there does not appear to be any marked general imitative tendency in these birds. ”

“ We ought to make an effort, as she does, to omit the useless and antiquated and get to the best and most useful as soon as possible; we ought to change what is to what ought to be, as far as we can. And I would not advocate this animal-like method of learning in place of the later ones unless it does the same work better. I simply suggest that in many cases where at present its use is never dreamed of, it may be a good method. As the fundamental form of intellection, every student of theoretical pedagogy ought to take it into account. ”

“ There can be no valid reason other than a pragmatic one for studying a man’s anxiety solely as felt by him while studying his body-temperature as thought of by him and others. And the practical reasons are all in favor of studying all facts as they exist for any impartial observer. A man’s mind as it is to thinking men is all that thinking men can deal with and all that they have any interest in dealing with. ”

“ Either a cat cannot connect ideas, representations, at all, or she has not the power of progressing from the thought of being in to the act of going in. The only difference between the first cat and the second cat is that the first cat, in the course of the experience, has the impulse to crawl through that door, while the second has not the impulse to crawl through the door or to drop through that hole. So, though you put the second cat on the box beside the hole, she doesn’t try to get into the box through it. The impulse is the sine qua non of the association. ”

“ We may, therefore, expect that when knowledge of the structure and behavior of the neurones comprising the connection-systems of animals (or of the neurones’ predecessors in this function) progresses far enough to inform us of just what happens when a connection is made stronger or weaker and of just what effects satisfying and annoying states of affairs exert upon the connection-system (and in particular upon the connections most recently in activity) the ability to learn will show as true an evolution as the ability to sneeze, oppose the thumb, or clasp an object touched by the hand. ”

“ The first law of behavior, one fraction of the general law of the uniformity of nature, is that with life and mind, as with mass and motion, the same cause will produce the same effect,—that the same situation will, in the same animal, produce the same response,—and that if the same situation produces on two occasions two different responses, the animal must have changed. ”

“ Nothing concerns him less than [19] their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion or reënact other people’s inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people’s character and destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. ”

“ The more radical question, the question of the utter exclusion of representative trains of thought, of any genuine association of ideas from the mental life of animals, is worth serious consideration. I confess that, although certain authentic anecdotes and certain experiments, to be described soon, lead me to reject this exclusion, there are many qualities in animals’ behavior which seem to back it up. If one takes his stand by a rigid application of the law of parsimony, he will find justification for this view which no experiments of mine can overthrow. ”

“ One may enjoy the effort to define the kind of mind-stuff in which one thinks of classes of facts, relations between facts and judgments about facts, and still protest that a proper balance in the study of intellect demands equal or greater attention to the problems of why any given animal thinks of any given fact, class or relation in any given situation and why he makes this or that judgment about it. ”

“ I may add that my observations of all the conduct of all these animals during the months spent with them, failed to find any act that even seemed due to reasoning. I should claim that this quarrel ought now to be dropped for good and all,—that investigation ought to be directed along more sensible and profitable lines. I should claim that the psychologist who studies dogs and cats in order to defend this ‘reason’ theory is on a level with a zoölogist who should study fishes with a view to supporting the thesis that they possessed clawed digits. ”