AN ATTEMPT TO REDUCE THE LEARNING PROCESS TO ITS ELEMENTS
This is a very serious occasion. What we now have before us is one of the great outstanding problems of psychology, a problem that has come down through the ages, with succeeding generations of psychological thinkers contributing of their best to its solution; and our task is to attack this problem afresh in the light of modern knowledge of the facts of learning and memory. We wish to gather up the threads from the three preceding chapters, which have detailed many facts regarding learned reactions of all sorts, and see whether we cannot summarize our accumulated knowledge in the form of a few great laws. We wish also to relate our laws to what is known of the brain machinery.