Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
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. Even if we leave out of question the power of reasoning,
the possession of a multitude of ideas and abstractions and the power of
control over impulses, purposive action, man is still the intellectual
leader of the animal kingdom by virtue of the superior development
in him of the power of forming associations between situations or
sense-impressions and acts, by virtue of the degree to which the mere
learning by selection possessed by all intelligent animals has advanced.
In man the type of intellect common to the animal kingdom finds its
fullest development, and with it is combined the hitherto nonexistent
power of thinking about things and rationally directing action in accord
with thought.
Indeed it may be that this very reason, self-consciousness and
self-control which seem to sever human intellect so sharply from that
of all other animals are really but secondary results of the tremendous
increase in the number, delicacy and complexity of associations which the
human animal can form. It may be that the evolution of intellect has no
breaks, that its progress is continuous from its first appearance to its
present condition in adult civilized human beings. If we could prove that
what we call ideational life and reasoning were not new and unexplainable
species of intellectual life but only the natural consequences of an
increase in the number, delicacy, and complexity of associations of
the general animal sort, we should have made out an evolution of mind
comparable to the evolution of living forms.
In 1890 William James wrote, “The more sincerely one seeks to trace the
actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have
come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly
one perceives ‘the slowly gathering twilight close in utter dark.’” Can
we perhaps prove him a false prophet? Let us first see if there be any
evidence that makes it probable that in some way or another the mere
extension of the animal type of intellect has produced the human sort. If
we do, let us proceed to seek a possible account of _how_ this might have
happened, and finally to examine any evidence that shows this possible
‘how’ to have been the real way in which human reason has evolved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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