History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weber§ 59. Condillac
The philosophy of Locke was introduced into France by Voltaire. (1) Here it found an original follower in the abbot Étienne Bonnot de CONDILLAC, (2) the founder of absolute sensationalism.
Locke distinguishes two sources of ideas: sensation and reflection, while Condillac, in his Traité des sensations recognizes but one, making reflection a product of sensibility. His proof is ingenious. He imagines a statue, which is organized and alive, like ourselves, but hindered by its marble exterior from having sensations. Its intellectual and moral life advances as the various parts of this covering are removed.
Let us first remove the marble covering its olfactory organs. Now the statue has only the sense of smell, and cannot, as yet, perceive anything but odors. It cannot acquire any idea of extension, form, sound, or color. A rose is placed before it. From the impression produced by it, a sensation of smell arises. Henceforth it is, from our point of view, a statue that smells a rose; in reality, however, it is nothing but the odor of this flower. The statue does not and cannot, as yet, possess the slightest notion of an object; it does not know itself as the subject of sensation; its consciousness, its "me," is nothing but the scent of the rose, or rather, what we call the scent of the rose.
Since this impression and the resulting sensation is the only thing with which our statue is occupied, that single sensation becomes attention.
We take away the rose. Our statue retains a trace, or an echo, as it were, of the odor perceived. This trace or echo is memory.
We place a violet, a jasmine, and some asafœtida before the statue. Its first sensation, the odor of the rose, was neither agreeable nor disagreeable, there being nothing to compare it with. But now other impressions and other sensations arise. These it compares with its memory images. It finds some agreeable, others disagreeable. Henceforth the statue desires the former, and rejects the latter. Towards these it entertains feelings of aversion, hatred, and fear, towards those, feelings of sympathy, affection, and hope. That is to say, from the sensations experienced by it, and their comparison, arise the passions, desires, and volitions. I will signifies I desire. The will is not a new faculty added to sensibility; it is a transformation of sensation; sensation becomes desire and impulse after having been attention, memory, comparison, pleasure, and pain.
From comparison, that is, from the multiplication of sensations, arise, on the other hand, judgment, reflection, reasoning, abstraction, in a word, the understanding. Our statue perceives disagreeable odors, and at the same time recalls other odors which gave it pleasure; these past sensations reappear in opposition to the present sensation, not as immediate sensations, but as copies or images of these sensations, that is, as ideas. It directs the attention to two different ideas and compares them. When there is double attention, there is comparison; for to be attentive to two ideas, and to compare them, is the same thing. Now, the statue cannot compare two ideas without perceiving some difference or resemblance between them: to perceive such relations is to judge. The acts of comparison and judgment are therefore merely attention; it is thus that sensation becomes successively attention, comparison, and judgment.
Some odors, that is, some of the states experienced by the statue, yielded pleasure, others yielded pain. Hence it will retain in memory the ideas of pleasure and pain common to several states or sensations. Pleasure is a quality common to the rose-sensation, the violet-sensation, and the jasmine-sensation; pain is a quality common to the odor of asafœtida, decaying matter, etc. These common characteristics are distinguished, separated, abstracted, from the particular sensations with which they are associated, and thus arise the abstract notions of pleasure, pain, number, duration, etc. These are general ideas, being common to several states or modes of being of the statue. We do not need a special faculty to explain them. Abstraction itself, the highest function of the understanding, is a modification of sensation, which, consequently, embraces all the faculties of the soul. The inner perception, or the me, is merely the sum of the sensations we now have, and those which we have had.
Condillac endows his statue with a single sense, - the sense of smell, - and then evolves all mental faculties out of sensation. (3) Any one of the five senses would have served his purpose equally well.
If now, we join, to smell: taste, hearing, and sight, by taking away one marble covering after another, then tastes, sounds, and colors will be added to the odors perceived by the statue, and its intellectual life will become so much richer, more manifold, and complex.
There is, however, an essential idea which neither smell, nor taste, nor hearing, nor even sight, can yield, and that is the idea of an object, the idea of an external world. Colors, sounds, odors, and tastes are mere sensations or states, not, as yet, referred to external objects. Before external causes can be substituted for its sensations, the statue must be endowed with the most important of all senses: the sense of touch. Touch alone can reveal to us the objective world, by giving us the ideas of extension, form, solidity, and body. Even sight cannot suggest them. Persons born blind cannot, upon receiving their sight, distinguish between a ball and a block, a cube and a sphere, until they touch these objects. (4) Only after having touched things do we refer the impressions received by our other senses, such as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells, to objects existing outside of us, Hence, touch is the highest sense, and the guide of the other senses; it is touch which teaches the eye to distribute colors in nature.
Conclusion and summary: All our ideas, without exception, are derived from the senses, and especially from touch.
Though Condillac is a sensationalist, and a sensationalist in the strict sense of the term, he is not, on that account, a materialist. (5) He differs from Locke, who grants that matter can think, and agrees with the Cartesians that compounds cannot think, and consequently that the subject of sensation cannot be corporeal in its nature. The movements of the body are, according to him, merely occasional causes of mental phenomena. Moreover, it is not certain that the body is an extended substance, as Descartes claims. But even if there were no real extension, that would not be a sufficient reason for denying the existence of bodies. Hence the negation of extension as such does not, according to Condillac, involve the acceptance of the immaterialism of Berkeley. He agrees with Leibniz that bodies might really exist and yet not be extended in themselves, that their essence might consist of something other than extension, and that this might be merely a subjective phenomenon, or a mode of perceiving them. At all events, there is something other than ourselves; that cannot be doubted. But what may be the nature of this "other thing," the statue does not know, nor do we know. That is, Condillac, the consistent disciple of Locke, is a sceptic in metaphysics, but his scepticism does not, as we have just seen, call in question the existence of matter, nor, consequently, materialism, using the term in the Berkeleyan sense. If to assume the reality of matter is to be a materialist, then, of course, he is a materialist. But in that case, Descartes is also a materialist. Moreover, he too, like Descartes, curries favor with the Church, which, in his capacity as a priest, he dare not openly antagonize. True, the human soul is merely the recipient of sense-impressions, and devoid of all faculties of knowledge except sensation; it is nothing but a prolonged and infinitely modified sensation. But that does not mean, he intimates, that it has always been restricted to sensation as the source of truth: its present nature dates from the Fall. Perhaps it was endowed with a higher faculty before the Fall. All we can say is that this is no longer the case.
It is hard to take these restrictions of the abbé of Mureaux seriously.
1. 1694-1778. Lettres sur les Anglais, 1728; Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, mis à la portéé de tout le monde, Amsterdam, 1738; La métaphysique de Newton ou parallèle des sentiments de Newton et de Leibniz, Amsterdam, 1740 ; Candide ou sur l'optimisme, 1757 ; Le philosophe ignorant, 1767. Simultaneously with these writings of Voltaire, the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes of Fontenelle (1657-1757), and the works of Maupertuis (1698-1759) made known to the French the labors of Copernicus and Newton, which were continued by Lagrange and Laplace (page 11). [On eighteenth century philosophy in France see Damiron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophic au X V111. siècle, 3 vols., Paris, 1858-64; and Bartholmbèss (p. 12). On Voltaire see the works of Bersot, Strauss, John Morley, Desnoiresterres, and Mayr. - Tr.]
2. Born at Grenoble, 1715; tutor of the Prince of Parma; abbot of Mureaux; died 1780. Besides the Traité des sensations (1754), he produced the following works: Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746); Traité des systèmes (1749); Traité des animaux, 1755; Logique (posthumous, 1781) ; Langue des animaux (posthumous). Complete works, Paris, 1798; 1803, 32 vols. in 12mo. F. Réthoré, Condillac ou l'empirisme et le rationalisme, Paris, 1864.
3. Condillac's object in choosing the least important of the five senses is plain. If the sense of smell suffices to make a complete soul, then, a fortiori, the combination of all five senses, or the total sensibility, will suffice.
4. Allusion to Cheselden's celebrated operation.
5. Sensationalism is usually, but erroneously, confused with materialism. Sensationalism is a theory concerning the origin of our ideas, an explanation of the phenomenon of mind (eine Erkenntnisstheorie, as the Germans would say), while materialism is an ontology, a system of metaphysics. Sensationalism and materialism are undoubtedly closely related, for materialism is necessarily sensational. But the reverse is not true.