The Intelligence of the Feebleminded Author:Alfred Binet Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. ATTENTION CONSIDERED FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ITS CONCENTRATION Many erroneous statements have been made in regard to the attention of defectives. Some ... more »have claimed that the idiot is absolutely lacking in attention, that he is an imbecile without attention, in a word, that it is the failure of attention which produces the idiot. Other authors have objected to this. The attention of idiots they say is not reduced to zero; there exists a little, a very little to be sure, but there is more in the imbecile and still more in the moron. We shall treat this question of attention by a very different method. We do not like these distinctions of little and much; and we cannot see what advantages would be gained by proving that the attention is better among morons than among imbeciles. This distinction is not false, but the idea is so vague that it is scarcely worthy of an attendant in a hospital. We shall endeavor to analyze the state of attention in idiots, imbeciles, and morons, and we hope to be able to show the precise characteristics by which the attention of an idiot—because he undeniably has attention—differs from that of an imbecile. The characteristic to which we shall attach the most importance is that of the concentration of the attention. We shall ask ourselves, (1) Can the attention of this subject be excited, awakened, and fixed upon a particular point? (2) Can this attention once attracted be held for a certain time? (3) If a cause of distraction occurs, and the attention is diverted, can it spontaneously return to the first object which it quitted? (4) Can it even resist the cause of distraction, and remain fixed upon the same object, in spite of all influences which would turn it aside? These arc the four degrees which we shall study, and which correspond to an...« less