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The Mind and the Brain

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About this book

Written in 1905, the same year Binet and Théodore Simon produced the first of their intelligence scales, this is the philosophical side of a man better known for measurement. The argument runs in two books. The first holds that everything we know of external objects reaches us as sensation, and that the mechanical theories physics builds of matter are symbols rather than the thing itself. The second turns inward, defining sensation, image, emotion, and consciousness in turn. A distinction between the act of knowing and the object known lets him refuse both the idealism that folds object into subject and the materialism that makes thought a property of nerve tissue. The authorised English version appeared in 1907; its translator is not named. The record of an experimental scientist reasoning about where his own methods stop.

About the author

Alfred Binet

Binet built the first workable intelligence scale in Paris in 1905, with Théodore Simon, for one specific purpose: the French government wanted to find the children who needed extra teaching.