Alfred Binet, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
To study thinking one must catch it in the act, and I found my best laboratory at home, in my two daughters, whose minds I observed and tested for years as they solved problems, defined words, described images, and reasoned aloud. I learned that thought is not one thing but many; that two intelligent minds — my Marguerite, my Armande — differ not in degree only but in type, the one observant and objective, the other imaginative and subjective; and that much of reasoning proceeds by an activity of the mind that leaves no image behind, a directing thought one feels working without being able to picture it.1
Reasoning is the organization of images and, beyond the images, of relations and attitudes the introspecting mind can barely seize.2 I hold that these higher operations — judgment, the sense of a relation, the feeling of a coming word — are the true and difficult subject of psychology, to be reached by patient experiment and controlled introspection, not to be dissolved into elementary sensations.3 The mind studied from within, under controlled conditions, gives up more than the reflex measured from without.
In short, images, along with sensations, constitute the materials of all intellectual operations; memory, reasoning, imagination are acts which consist, in an ulti mate analysis, of grouping and co-ordinating images, in apprehending the relations already formed between them, and in reuniting them into new relations. "Just as the body is a polypus of cells," said M.The Psychology of Reasoning, pp. 10–12
The " I wish to pipi" or the " I cannot write because my finger is bad," cannot be expressed in images; they are thoughts of relations which can only express themselves in words; and if the words do not suffice, as in the present case, it is not the image which supplements their absence.12 J2 Since we are here treating a question of general psychology, we seize the opportunity to add that one of us (Binet), in…The Intelligence of the Feeble-Minded, pp. 214–215
For several years past these pseudo-sensations have attracted the special attention of psychologists. They are called representations in Germany. In France the prevailing term is images; it is this which we shall use.The Psychology of Reasoning, pp. 8–10
Binet's experimental-introspective studies of reasoning and of his daughters' contrasting mental types are a recognized early contribution to cognitive and individual-differences psychology, and they touch the "imageless thought" controversy: his finding of directing, imageless components of thought aligns with the Würzburg school (Külpe) against Titchener's insistence that all thought is sensory-imaginal. The introspective method he used has the known limits that later discredited pure introspection, but his focus on the higher operations of reasoning, on qualitative types of mind, and on thought as the organization of relations prefigures modern cognitive psychology, which returned to reasoning and problem-solving with better methods. A respected, if methodologically dated, contribution.