Alfred Binet: Quotes about the world

“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.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 27

World , Science , Past

“Thoughts have some characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events centuries away; they conceive objects which are unreal; they imagine combinations which upset all physical laws, and, further, these conceptions remain invisible to others as well as to ourselves. They are outside the grip of reality, and constitute a world which becomes, for any one with the smallest imagination, as great and as important as the world called real. One may call in evidence the poets, novelists, artists, and the dreamers of all kinds. When life becomes too hard for us, we fly to the ideal world, there to seek forgetfulness or compensation.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 76

Life , World , Law , Travel

“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.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 12

World

“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.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 60; Definition of sensation

World , Past

“This observation might be repeated with regard to all objects of the outer world which enter into relation with us. Whether the knowledge of them be of the common-place or of a scientific order matters little. Sensation is its limit, and all objects are known to us by the sensations they produce in us, and are known to us solely in this manner. A landscape is nothing but a cluster of sensations. The outward form of a body is simply sensation; and the innermost and most delicate material structure, the last visible elements of a cell, for example, are all, in so far as we observe them with the microscope, nothing but sensation.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 13-14

World , Knowledge

“When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour, odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light. In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

...In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in. And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those sensations themselves.”

Alfred Binet

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

World , Way , Communication , Idea