Alfred Binet

“Alfred Binet ∞ Psychologist”

“Human Intelligence: Alfred Binet”

“Alfred Binet's biography on Psychology.about.com”

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“It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.”

“Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.”

“"Never!" What a strong word! A few modern philosophers seem to lend their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts when they assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism. We shall attempt to prove that it is without foundation.”

“Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them.”

“When making the analysis of matter we impliedly admitted two propositions: first, that sensation is the tertium quid which is interposed between the excitant of our sensory nerves and ourselves; secondly, that the aggregate of our sensations is all we can know of the outer world, so that it is correct to define this last as the collection of our present, past, and possible sensations.”

“The mechanical conception of the universe is nothing but naïve realism.”

“We are, for the rest, so wrapped up in sensations that none of our boldest conceptions can break through the circle.”

“The world is but an assembly of present, past, and possible sensations; the affair of science is to analyze and co-ordinate them by separating their accidental from their constant relations.”

“Since we seek to know what is the physical phenomenon we perceive, we must first enunciate this proposition, which will govern the whole of our discussion: to wit— Of the outer world we know nothing except our sensations.”

“I wish that people would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved (by large studies); the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion.”

“It seems to me that people of talent and of genius serve better than average examples for making us understand the laws of character, because they present more extreme traits.”

“Mere numbers cannot bring out... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas!... The experimenter judges what may be going on in (the subject’s) mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description!”

“It is necessary to protect oneself from over exaggeration; one must not suppose that there exists, even in the realm of partial memory, an absolutely pure auditory type; real life does not make such schemas... In reality, when one says that a person belongs to the auditory type... one wants to say simply that with regard to that person the auditory memory is preponderant.”