“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.”
Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 42-43
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Alfred Binet 21
French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intell… 1857–1911Related quotes

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, On John Dryden (1828)
Misattributed

On John Dryden (1828)

Waldersee on his diary, 16 March 1892, describing Kaiser Wilhelm II

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 39
Context: Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.
As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to read with. It seemed possible.

“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”
An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

"The Letter and the Spirit", in the journal Music and Letters, vol. 1 (1920) p. 88.