SIXTH EPOCH.

THE ORIGIN OF KNOWLEDGE REFERRED TO SENSATION BY THE CONFUSION OF THOUGHT WITH FEELING: THE SENSATIONAL SCHOOL.

CHAPTER I.

CONDILLAC.

§ I. LIFE OF CONDILLAC.

ETIENNE DE CONDILLAC was born at Grenoble, in 1715. His life was passed mainly in study, and was not varied by any of those incidents which give interest and romance to biography. He published his first work, Essai sur l' Origine des Connoissances Humaines, in 1746. Three years after, his Traité des Systèmes. His other works followed rapidly; and established for him such a reputation, that he was appointed tutor to the Prince of Parma, and for whose instruction he wrote the Cours d'Etudes. In 1768 the capricious doors of the Académie Française were opened to him; but once elected a member, he never after attended any of its sittings. He published his Logique in his old age, and left behind him his Langue des Calculs. He died in 1780.

§ II. CONDILLAC'S SYSTEM.

We have seen how Idealism and skepticism grew out of the doctrines respecting the origin of knowledge. We have now to see the growth of the "Sensational School."

The success which Locke met with in France is well known.

For a whole century the countrymen of Descartes extolled the English philosopher, little suspecting how that philosopher would have disclaimed their homage, could he have witnessed it. Condillac is the acknowledged representative of Locke in France. When his first work, entitled Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances Humaines, appeared, he had no notion of simplifying Locke by reducing all Knowledge to Sensation. He was a modest Lockeist, and laid down as the fundamental principle, that "sensations and the operations of the mind are the materials of all our knowledge-materials which reflection sets in action by seeking their combinations and relations." (Chap. i. § 5.)

In 1754 appeared his celebrated work, the Traité des Sensations. In it he quits Locke's principle for that of Gassendi and Hobbes. "The chief object of this work," he says, "is to show how all our knowledge and all our faculties are derived from the senses; or, to speak more accurately, from sensations." The inclusion of “our faculties," as well as our ideas, in this sensuous origin, is, however, due entirely to Condillac. Hobbes never thought of such a "simplification." The divergence from Locke is obvious: instead of the two sources of ideas, recognized in the Essay on Human Understanding, it assumes one source onlySensation; instead of mind, with certain elementary faculties, it assumes one elementary faculty-that of Sensibility-out of which all the faculties are evolved by the action of external objects on the senses. Nor was this a mere slip of Condillac's pen: the error is radical; it constitutes the peculiarity of his system. Speaking of various philosophers, and quoting, with praise, the maxim attributed to Aristotle, that "Nothing is in the intellect which was not previously in the senses," he adds, "Immediately after Aristotle comes Locke; for the other philosophers who have written on this subject are not worthy of mention. This Englishman has certainly thrown great light on the subject, but he has left some obscurity. All the faculties of the soul appeared to him to be innate qualities, and he never suspected they might be derived from sensation itself.”

Certainly, Lock◆ never suspected any thing of the kind, and would loudly have repudiated it, had any one suggested such a simplification of the psychological problem. He might have asked Condillac, why is it no Ape having the five senses of Man has ever yet been educated as a Man? and if faculties are nothing but sensations, why are the faculties of the Ape so remarkably inferior, when the senses, some of them at least, are so remarkably superior to those of Man? We find, on the one hand, animals having senses like those of man, but not having the faculties of man; we find, on the other hand, men deficient in certain senses-sight, hearing, taste, or smell-who, so far from being deficient in mental faculties, are remarkable for their high endowments: a striking example of which is the case of Laura Bridgman, born blind, deaf, and dumb. Nay, among men having all the senses in activity, we find the greatest disparities in mental faculty; and we do not find that the men whose senses are the most susceptible and active, are the men whose intellectual faculties are the most developed; which is strange, if the faculties are nothing but sensations. How does Condillac explain the familiar fact of Idiots being in full possession of their senses? When he makes his famous Statue grow into an Intelligence, by the gradual evolution of one sense after the other, it never occurs to him that he tacitly admits the presence of the very mind which is said to be evolved; since in the absence of that mind the senses will not elevate the statue one inch above idiocy.

Had Condillac been surveying the animal series, and endeavoring to trace the gradual development of Sensibility throughout that series, he might have maintained, with some philosophical cogency, that the various faculties were the derivative products. of sensation. But he had no such conception. He looked upon the mind as a tabuta rasa, a blank page on which sensations wrote certain characters; and instead of regarding the mind in the light of an organism, the food of which was furnished by the senses, he regarded it as a simple granary, in which the grain, on

entering, "transformed itself" into bread, oven, and baker. He 'thought the senses created the faculties and were the faculties. He might as well have said that exercise creates the faculty of running. The child cannot run till he has exercised his limbs; but the exercise does not give him the limbs, it only calls them into action.

Condillac is right in saying that we are not born with the mental faculties developed (a point to be touched upon hereafter), but he is wrong in saying that these faculties are only sensations. And when he endeavored to construct the mind and its faculties out of transformed sensations, he never once suspected that the faculty of transformation-that which transforms —could not be itself a sensation. It is very easy to imagine transformed sensations; but the sensations do not, we presume, transform themselves. What is it that transforms them? The mind? Not so. The mind is the aggregate of our mental states, faculties, etc.; the mind is made up of "transformed sensations," and cannot, therefore, be the transforming power. We return to the charge, and demand, What is it which transforms? Condillac has no answer. All he can say is, what he says over and over again, that our faculties are transformed sensations. Hear him:

“Locke distinguishes two sources of ideas, sense and reflection. It would be more exact to recognize but one; first, because reflection is, in its principle, nothing but sensation itself; secondly, because it is less a source of ideas than a canal through which they flow from sense.

"This inexactitude, slight as it may seem, has thrown much obscurity over his system. He contents himself with recognizing that the soul perceives, thinks, doubts, believes, reasons, wills, reflects; that we are convinced of the existence of these operations, because we find them in ourselves, and they contribute to the progress of our knowledge; but he did not perceive the necessity of discovering their origin and the principle of their generation-he did not suspect that they might only be acquired

habits; he seems to have regarded them as innate, and he says only that they may be perfected by exercise."*

This is far enough from Locke,t who would have been amazed to hear that "judgment, reflection, the passions, in a word, all the faculties of the mind, are nothing but sensation which transforms itself differently (qui se transforme différemment)."

As it is curious to see how sensation transforms itself into these faculties, we will translate Condillac's account. "If a multitude of sensations operate at the same time with the same degree of vivacity, or nearly so, man is then only an animal that feels; experience suffices to convince us that then the multitude of impressions takes away all activity from the mind. But let only one sensation subsist, or without entirely dismissing the others, let us only diminish their force; the mind is at once occupied more particularly with the sensation which preserves its vivacity, and that sensation becomes attention, without its being necessary for us to suppose any thing else in the mind. If a new sensation acquire greater vivacity than the former, it will become in its turn attention. But the greater the force which the former had, the deeper the impression made on us, and the longer it is preserved. Experience proves this. Our capacity of sensation is therefore divided into the sensation we have had, and the sensation which we now have; we perceive them both at once, but we perceive them differently: the one seems as past, the other as present. The name of sensation designates the impression actually made upon our senses; and it takes that of memory when it presents itself to us as a sensation which has formerly been felt. Memory, therefore, is only the transformed sensation. When there is double attention, there is comparison; for to be

* Extrait raissonné du Traité des Sensations: Euvres de Condillac (1803), iv. 13.

+ It would be idle to refute here the vulgar notion that Condillac perfected Locke's principles; or, as M. Cousin absurdly says, that Locke's Essay was the rough sketch (ébauche) of which the Traité des Sensations is the perfected picture; such a notion can be entertained only by those who blindly accept traditionary judgments. The brief exposition we shall give of Condillac is a sufficient answer to all such assertions.