Edward Thorndike Quotes

1. “Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.”

2. “Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man.”

3. “This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.”

4. “Human education is concerned with certain changes in the intellects, characters and behavior of men, its problems being roughly included under these four topics: Aims, materials, means and methods.”

5. “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.”

6. “Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.”

7. “Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.”

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

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

10. “For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.”