Alfred Binet’s writings

Most of what is quoted from Alfred Binet today comes from Modern Ideas About Children (Les idées modernes sur les enfants), published in 1909, two years before his death. The book is mostly out of print in English. Below is a curated set of the passages that matter, with their original sources and the context that produced them.

On intelligence as a fixed quantity (the “brutal pessimism” passage)

“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.”Modern Ideas About Children, 1909, p. 105–106

This is the most quoted passage Binet ever wrote and the centre of his philosophy. The “recent philosophers” he had in mind were not named in the original text; they were broadly the hereditarian psychologists of the late nineteenth century who held that intelligence was inborn and unchangeable.

On what intelligence is

“Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.”Modern Ideas About Children, 1909, p. 118

This is Binet’s working definition of intelligence as a plurality. It anticipated by sixty years the multi-factor models that the modern Stanford-Binet is built on.

On the faculty being measured

“This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances.”The Development of Intelligence in Children, 1916 English ed., p. 42–43

For Binet the right name for what his test measured was judgement, not “intelligence” in the modern abstract sense. The English translation flattened this distinction; the original French word jugement carries the same dual meaning of “discernment” and “decision-making” that the English word once did.

On sensation and reality

“Of the outer world we know nothing except our sensations.”The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 12

Binet was a working empiricist; this is the opening philosophical premise of The Mind and the Brain. The book ranges across consciousness, perception, hypnotism, and the nature of subjective experience. It was published the year before the second edition of the Binet-Simon Scale.

Sources used on this page

• Les idées modernes sur les enfants (Binet, 1909). English: Modern Ideas About Children, trans. Heisler, 1975.
• L’âme et le corps (Binet, 1905). English: The Mind and the Brain, trans. Legge, 1907.
• Le développement de l’intelligence chez les enfants (Binet & Simon, 1908). English: The Development of Intelligence in Children, 1916.
• Wikiquote: Alfred Binet — verified citations of the above passages.

More on Alfred Binet: the man behind the test · Théodore Simon