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Alfred Binet Quotes
1857–1911 France
Alfred Binet (July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale, along with his collaborator Théodore Simon.
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Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alfred Binet (1903)
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.
Alfred Binet (1903)
Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.
Les idées modernes sur les enfants (1909)
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.
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