A Review Of Geraldine Jonçich's The Sane Positivist: A Biography Of Edward L. Thorndike.

Very little in the published histories of psychology prepares us for the giant that emerges from the pages of Geraldine Jonçich’s The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (1968). In his history of experimental psychology, Boring (1950) devotes two pages to the man, sandwiched in among other notes on ‘‘Columbia’s Functional Psychology.’’ But Thorndike himself had been almost equally laconic in his autobiographical sketch in Murchison’s (1936) History of Psychology in Autobiography III. Out of his busy schedule, he managed to free enough time to write seven pages on his own life. Thirteen years later, in the year of his death, he provided an additional two pages, concluding with ‘‘It should perhaps be noted that I have spent much time and thought on educational science