University of Virginia Library

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: VOL. I, THE ORIGINAL NATURE OF MAN VOL. II, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING. By Edward L. Thorndike. Published by Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1913.

In the first three chapters of Vol. I Professor Thorndike introduces what he calls the `original tendencies' of man. These are the simpler and what have often been called the `instinctive', or `innate' forms of behaviour. And they are here taken as innate, in contradistinction to learned; as the inherited dispositions on which the character of the adult is built. In Chapters IV to X, inclusive, these original tendencies are enumerated and described. This is a valuable, although somewhat unordered, inventory of the more elementary human activities. A wholesome step is taken in replacing the terms `pleasure' and `pain' (subjective categories supposed from time immemorial to account for many sorts of reaction and to be the basis of the learning process) by the more objective terms `satisfiers' and `annoyers'. The author inclines

away from the common idea that very young individuals exhibit random or diffuse activities

A curiously baffling and admirably sceptical chapter on the Emotions (XI) is followed by a largely destructive chapter on Consciousness, Learning, and Remembering, in which Prof. Thorndike is in point of literary style almost at his worst; and in some cases incoherent (e.g. p. 185, middle). The chapters on the Anatomy and Physiology, on the Source, on the Order and Dates of Appearance and Disappearance, and on the Value and Use of Original Tendencies seem to the reviewer inconclusive and uninspired. There are shrewd and interesting remarks here and there, particularly those of a destructive intent, which the older reader will appreciate; while on the whole he will wonder whether the author has, in these last four chapters, any other than the whimsical aim of producing bedlam in the minds of his younger readers.

Vol. II is a long treatise of 452 pages on the faculty of Learning. The author would probably reject the suggestion that he is dealing with his subject in the spirit of the faculty psychology. Learning, he would say, is an empirical fact, which he is simply describing. So also, however, the `faculties' are empirical phenomena—attention, memory, and all the rest. The question is, do Prof. Thorndike and others like minded analyze the phenomena in a way that reveals their mechanism, or in the unfruitful manner of the faculty psychology? Is, for instance, the mind an aggregate of the following "functions that have been, or might be, studied:—Ability to spell cat, ability to spell, knowledge that √ 289 equals 17, ability to read English, knowledge of telegraphy,. . . . ability to give the opposites of good, up, day, and night, . . . . fear and avoidance of snakes, misery at being scorned," etc., etc. (p. 59)? To the reviewer it appears that these `functions' are cross-sections of the mental life which reveal nothing of the mind's real mechanism. This way, surely, lie the maximum of pedantry and the minimum of scientific insight. The volume as a whole may be recommended to those who wish to ascertain to what extent academic psychology of to-day is still dominated by the spirit of faculty psychology.

E. B. HOLT.