SOURCE: A review of Man and His Works, in Mind, Vol. LIV, No. 213, January, 1945, pp. 161-71.

In the following review, Bartlett asserts that his impression of Thorndike as an ingenious researcher was confirmed after reading Man and His Works.

Professor Thorndike plunges at once into a discussion of Nature's gifts to Man [in Man and His Works]. He prefers genetic language, and calls the gifts in which he is most interested ‘genes’. Others have called them ‘tendencies’, ‘predispositions’, ‘instincts’, and even, sometimes, ‘faculties’. Whatever name they are given they are always supposed to have some special concern with action. They are elements, or groups of elements, in the internal constitution of animals, including man, which require stimulation from outside to make them do anything, but which, so far as they themselves go, owe nothing else to the outside world. People who call them ‘tendencies’, or something like that...