Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

First published Thu Oct 17, 2002; substantive revision Thu Sep 21, 2017

Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, was the chiefexponent of a radically empiricist account of the workings of the mindthat has since come to be referred to as “sensationism.”Whereas John Locke’s empiricism followed upon a rejection ofinnate principles and innate ideas, Condillac went further andrejected innate abilities as well. On his version of empiricism,experience not only provides us with “ideas” or the rawmaterials for knowledge, it also teaches us how to focus attention,remember, imagine, abstract, judge, and reason. It forms our desiresand teaches us what to will. Moreover, it provides us with the bestlessons in the performance of these operations, so that a study of howwe originally learn to perform them also tells us how those operationsought to be performed. The pursuit of this tenet led Condillac toarticulate an early developmental psychology, with explicitpedagogical and methodological implications. His concerns also led himto focus on the theory of perception, and to advance important andoriginal views on our perception of spatial form. He offered a moresearching, careful, and precise account of what exactly is given to usby each of the sense organs than any that had been offered up to hisday, and presented a highly nuanced account of how this raw data isworked up into our beliefs about the world around us.

1. Life and Works

Condillac was born on September 30, 1714 in Grenoble as the third sonof Gabriel Bonnot, Vicomte de Mably, and Catherine de La Coste.(“Condillac” was the name of an estate purchased by hisfather in 1720.) He is said to have had very poor eyesight and a weakphysical constitution, factors that so retarded his intellectualdevelopment that as late as his twelfth year he was still unable toread. His education began only in his teens, first under the directionof a local priest, then at Lyons, where he went to live with his olderbrother, Jean, after the death of their father. Perhaps because of hisreticence and his late learning his family regarded him as possessinglimited intellectual abilities. He nonetheless managed to continue hiseducation as a seminarian in Paris, at Saint-Suplice and at theSorbonne. He took holy orders in 1740 and wore a cassock for the restof his life, but did no pastoral work. After some years spent livingthe life of a man of letters in Paris, during which he came to beclosely acquainted with Rousseau and Diderot, and published work thatwon him election to the Prussian Academy of the Sciences (1749), heaccepted a position as tutor to the Prince of Parma, a post that heheld from 1758–68. He returned to Paris in 1768 and was electedto the French Academy in that year, but he left the city shortlyafter, in 1773, and took up residence on a country estate he hadpurchased near Beaugency. He died there on August 3, 1780.

Condillac published two main philosophical works: theEssay on theOrigin of Human Knowledge of 1746, and theTreatise onSensations of 1754, both of which were devoted to expositing hisviews on the role of experience in the development of our cognitivecapacities.

The earlierEssay was a less radical work. Though it soughtto explain how the cognitive faculties are developed as a consequenceof sensation, it took sensation itself largely for granted. Condillacexplicitly rejected the views that the mind can make judgments that itis not aware of, and that we can confuse the products of inferentialoperations with immediately given sensations. As a consequence, hemaintained, in opposition to Molyneux, Locke, and Berkeley, that we donot need to learn to perceive visual depth. However, theEssay was also more wide-ranging than theTreatise.It devoted attention to the development of language and its role bothin the acquisition of our more sophisticated cognitive powers and inthe generation of false philosophies. These are topics that Condillaclater relegated to his works on logic.

In theTreatise Condillac focused just on our pre-linguisticcognitive abilities, which he came to think he might haveunderestimated when he wrote theEssay. He retracted hisearlier claim that perception is a transparent process and acceptedboth that it involves unconscious inference from what is given insensation and that sensation itself may contain more than it is atfirst perceived to contain. He also retracted his earlier claim thatdepth is immediately perceived by vision. To support these revisedopinions, he proposed a famous thought experiment. He asked hisreaders to consider an originally inanimate and insentient human being(Condillac spoke of a being that is just a “statue” of ahuman being) and to consider what this being could come to know wereit to acquire each of the senses in isolation from the others, or eachin combination with just one or two others. In proposing this questionCondillac was asking a more radical version of the question Molyneuxhad posed to Locke: would a person born blind and made to see perceivespatial features well enough upon first sight to be able to identifycubes and spheres without touching them? Condillac was asking what aperson endowed with just a sense of smell would think upon acquiringthe power of hearing, or what a person endowed with vision would knowif unaffected by hunger, incapable of motion, and unaware of anytactile sensation. His answer to these questions sought not just toexplain how this person would acquire ideas of space and of externalobjects, but to prove that nothing more would be needed for it toacquire all the knowledge and all of the abilities that we have otherthan just to experience a sufficiently rich array of sensations.

Condillac’s other philosophical works support and embellish thedoctrines of theEssay and theTreatise. They aretheTreatise on Systems of 1749, which is devoted tocritiquing the metaphysics and the methodology of earlierphilosophers, theTreatise on Animals of 1755, which attemptsto explain how human souls differ from those of animals with respectto intelligence and free will, the “Dissertation onLiberty”, an important short work appended to theTreatiseon Sensations that further addresses the issue of human freewill, the “Summary[extrait raisonné] of theTreatise on Sensations,” originally included in theTreatise on Animals, and a textbook on Logic (1780). He alsopublished a work on commerce and government, assembled a dictionary ofsynonyms, and put together a multi-volume course of studies that hehad developed while tutoring the Prince of Parma. The latter dealtprincipally with history but also included some philosophicalmaterial, including a different presentation of logic. At the time ofhis death he left an incomplete a work entitledThe Language ofCalculation.

2. The Metaphysics of Condillac’s Sensationism

Condillac’s account of the development of our cognitivecapacities was informed by a particular conception of the nature ofthe mind and the sensations it is originally given. He argued that themind must be an unextended or immaterial substance (EssayI.i.1 §6).^[1] When it senses, nothing actually passes into it from the outsideworld or the body. Instead the action of external objects on the senseorgans brings about changes in the body and these changes serve as themerely occasional cause of the production of sensations in the mind.

Sensations are modifications of our being. To understand them asimages of something distinct from us is to treat them as“ideas” rather than simply as “sensations,”and that is an operation that is so far from being automatic that itexceeds the capacities of animals. However, unlike Reid, who was laterto argue for a rigorous distinction between sensations, considered asstates of feeling experienced by the mind, and perceptions, consideredas acts of thinking something about an object, Condillac maintainedthat sensations do lend themselves to being treated as ideas. Hedenied that sensations are “something that only occurs asidefrom thoughts and modifies them” and insisted that they are“as representative” as any other thought experienced bythe mind (Essay I.ii.2 §9).

3. Sensation in theEssay

Most early modern philosophers were impressed by the facts ofgeometrical optics, which teach that light imprints an inverted,left-right reversed image of the external world on the concave surfaceof the back of the eye. If we accept that the eye is the means ofvisual perception, then this teaching appears to imply that the eyesfilter out information about the distance at which objects are setoutwards from us and transmit just information about position alongthe horizon and the azimuth to the mind. After all, while points atdifferent angles of inclination upwards or downwards from the horizon,or at different compass directions will project light to differentparts of the retina, points that differ only with reference to theirdistance outwards from the eye will project light onto the same partof the eye. But if differences in distance outwards make no differenceto the impression on the eye, and the mind is only affected as aconsequence of how the eye is affected, then information about outwarddistances is not conveyed to the mind. It would seem, therefore, thatvisual perception must originally lack information about distanceoutwards. It must consist of an awareness of images that are onlytwo-dimensional projections of solid objects in a three dimensionalspace.

But the Condillac of theEssay was not impressed by theseconsiderations. Though he admitted that the image imprinted by lighton the eye is merely two-dimensional, he denied that the mind musttherefore only be aware of a two-dimensional image (EssayI.vi §2). However he had little to say about how the mind mightacquire information about outward distances, and instead confinedhimself to attacking the standard account.^[2] On the standard account, when I perceive a three dimensional object,such as a uniformly coloured globe, I must really see a twodimensional projection of that object, variously shaded in itsdifferent parts, and then judge that this two-dimensional, variouslycoloured image is a representation of a uniformly colouredthree-dimensional object (the classic presentation of this view is tobe found in Locke’sEssay, book II, chapter ix,paragraph 8). But I am not conscious of seeing a flat, variouslycoloured circle, nor am I conscious of making a judgment about whatthis image represents. Instead, I seem to immediately see a uniformlycoloured, three-dimensional object. Moreover, try as I might, I cannotmake myself aware of drawing an inference. And I have so littleawareness of the flat, variously coloured circle that I supposedly seethat, without the aid of instruction in drawing or painting, I wouldhave no idea that it bears any relation to a uniformly coloured globe.Condillac found this insupportable. The mind, he maintained, cannot beso deeply ignorant of what it senses or of what it does(Essay I.vi §§3–5).

Consistently with the view that we do not need to learn to perceivedepth, Condillac maintained that we do not need to learn to perceiveseparation in any other spatial dimension. Consequently, a previouslyblind person, made to see for the first time, should see colours to beextended over all three dimensions. The alternative, inCondillac’s view is that the newly sighted person wouldexperience just a “mathematical point” of colour, and herejected this as patently absurd (Essay I.vi.§§12–14).

Condillac was aware that these claims had been challenged by suchempirical studies of recovered vision as were available at the time.In 1728, the English surgeon, William Chesselden, had reported to theBritish Royal Society that subjects recovering from operations toremove cataracts that had blinded them since birth appeared to need tolearn to associate what they saw with tactile experience before theycould recognize shapes or objects. Condillac replied to this contraryevidence by claiming that it would take some time for newly sightedsubjects to learn how to focus the eyes in order to perceive coloursdistinctly, and so to see their outlines. It would then take time forthe subjects to attend to the shapes that distinctly seen coloursexhibit, since we can expect that at first they would be overwhelmedand confused by the variety of information presented by the eyes, muchlike a person gaining a first glimpse of a Bosch painting. Finally,even after they came to see colours as, say, outlining square or roundshapes, they might still hesitate to assume that simply because anobject looks to have a certain shape, that therefore it must be feltto have that shape as well. For all of these reasons, time might passand the subject might appear to be learning to associate visualexperiences with tangible objects, even though the colours that areoriginally seen are already extended and shaped in three dimensions(Essay I.vi. §16).

4. Sensation in theTreatise

Condillac’s reply to the Chesselden data contained the germs ofan insight that was to be central for the laterTreatise: theclaim that visual sensations, and indeed all sensations, might containinformation that goes unnoticed by a subject simply because it is notattended to. This insight, already present in theEssay, wassubversive. It challenged that work’s rejection of perception bymeans of unconscious sensations and unconscious inferences. It led totheTreatise’s claim that having a sensation does notimply being conscious of everything that sensation involves(Treatise I.xi.8, III.iii.6).

In hisLogic, Condillac illustrated this point by asking hisreaders to imagine a group of people who travel by night to a chateausituated on a high point before a vast panorama of fields, mountains,cities, towns, and forests. At dawn, the windows are thrown open forjust an instant. In that instant, each member of the companyexperiences a compound visual sensation consisting of multiple,simultaneously present colour patches disposed in space so as todepict all the parts of the panorama that lies out in a particulardirection. But from the view obtained in just an instant, no one cansay what it was that they saw. If the shutters are left open for morethan an instant nothing new is presented to the company. That is, theydo not have any sensation they did not have in the first instant. Theycome to perceive what it is they at first already sensed byselectively attending to each of its parts in turn and then noting howthese parts are related to one another (Logic, Part I,Chapter ii).

Condillac had always appreciated that this act of attention is not aninnate operation, any more than such higher cognitive operations asabstraction, judgment, or reasoning are innate operations. We need tolearn how to attend to what we sense. Experience itself serves as ourteacher. The operation of attention is invoked by our needs andinterests. We attend first to what promises to satisfy our needs andinterests, which are always with us and which always direct ourthought. Our knowledge of what promises to satisfy our needs andinterests is a product of past experience, which has made us aware ofwhat objects are connected with the frustration or satisfaction ofthose needs and interests. The needs and interests themselves aredeveloped as a consequence of a past experience of pleasure and pain,which in turn are intrinsic features not just of tactile experience,but of all of our sensations. However, in theEssay Condillachad not appreciated the full implications of this view. Recognizingthose implications required being more careful about specifying whatis originally given in sensation, what is originally attended to, andwhat leads us to attend to anything else. The device of the slowlyanimated “statue” was invoked to assist in making thesedeterminations.

Condillac supposed that the most primitive form of experience would bethe sense of smell. A being (Condillac’s “statue”)endowed with just this one sense but no motive power would, Condillacsupposed, be capable of receiving pleasure or pain from the experienceof different odoriferous objects. However, all that the being could doto avoid painful or acquire pleasurable sensations would be to try todistract itself with remembered or imagined smells when occurrent onesproved uninteresting or unappealing.

We would consider such a being to be a being who smells, say, a rose,and who is thereby affected in a certain way. Some might consider thiseffect to be a rose smell sensation that somehow stands before themind as an object of contemplation. Others might consider the effectto be an act that has the scent of a rose as its intentional object,or an act of feeling a certain way (“rose-scentedly”). ButCondillac maintained that the being itself would not at first have anyconception of objects distinct from itself or even any conception ofitself, let alone any views on the metaphysical status of its sensorystates. When it smells a rose, it experiences itself as simply beingthe smell of a rose (Treatise I.i.2). If it smells more thanone object at once, the smells likely amalgamate into a single,complex scent that it experiences as simple and unique. If itexperiences different smells in succession, the memory of the earlierone may linger while the other comes to be present and then it maybecome aware of itself as having been something different from what itis now so will discover that is a thing that endures through time(Treatise I.ii.10).

If the being were allowed to have senses of sound in addition tosmell, different, simultaneously experienced sounds would likewise beexperienced by it as one noise, but Condillac supposed that any soundwould be too different from any simultaneously occurring taste for thetwo to be amalgamated, as long as either one had once been experiencedon its own. Thus, a being endowed with senses of both smell andhearing would experience itself as being both a smell and a sound, andso would experience itself as having a double existence(Treatise I.ix.3–4). It would not, however, necessarilyexperience itself as being twothings at once, at least notif we take the term “thing” to refer to substances.Condillac claimed that, were each particular smell only everexperienced in conjunction with just one particular sound, and viceversa, the two would not be thought of as distinct things orsubstances, even though they would be distinguished from one another.Instead, the smell would be experienced as having a sound and thesound as having a scent. Otherwise put, each would play the role ofproperty to the other. This is all that there ever is to our conceptof substance, insofar as that concept has any meaning at all and isnot simply a meaningless word invented by philosophers. Substance isnot some substratum in which properties inhere, but a collection ofsensations or qualities or properties commonly observed to occurtogether (Treatise I.xii.3, III.iv.2).

As has been noted, in theTreatise Condillac abandoned hisearlier view that we immediately see depth. However, he continued tomaintain that light and colours are extended over the remaining twodimensions. A being endowed with a sense of sight and presented with avariously coloured panorama would not experience all the differentcolours to be amalgamated into a point. Neither, Condillac supposed,would it blend the different colours with one another so as to see auniformly coloured expanse. It would still continue to experienceitself as simply being each of the colours it sees. Insofar as thesecolours are not merely multiple but outside of one another in space,the being would experience itself as not merely having a multipleexistence, but also as being “outside” of itself. AsCondillac put it, insofar as it is red it experiences itself as beingoutside of itself insofar as it is as green (TreatiseI.xi.8).

It was at this point that Condillac’s thesis that sensing doesnot entail being conscious of all that one senses came to the fore. Wewould think that if colours are extended and different colours aresimultaneously seen without being blended, then there must be edgesbetween them, and shapes outlined by those edges. Condillac acceptedthat this would in fact be the case. But he denied that his“statue” would necessarily have to be aware of this fact.The “statue” would need some reason to turn its attentionto the boundaries between colours, to identify the various parts ofthose boundaries, and to notice what shape they constitute. But if itonly considered colour sensations to be its own states of being, andtook pleasure or pain only in their chromatic qualities and not intheir shapes (a rather large presumption that Condillac seems not tohave realized making), it would have no reason to notice that colourshave shapes or even that they have particular locations relative toone another. Consequently, even though it would experience colours asbeing extended and outside of one another, it would not notice thatthe array of simultaneously present colour sensations forms anunbroken continuum. It would experience its coloured self merely as anaggregate of distinct extensions, vaguely perceived as not having anydefinite boundaries or shapes, and not recognized as having anylocations relative to one another. Consequently, it would have nodeveloped concept of space (Treatise I.xi.8–9).

Condillac maintained that it is only through the sense of touch that abeing first acquires an awareness of space as an external continuumextending outwards beyond the bounds of its body, and an awareness ofother objects in this space. Touch then teaches us to attributesmells, sounds, tastes, and colours to external objects.

Like Thomas Reid, who some ten years later also set aboutinvestigating what each of the senses can lead us to learn, Condillactook the tactile sensation of solidity to be crucial for thedevelopment of an awareness of space and of external objects. Onlywhereas Reid maintained that we are innately so constituted as tounderstand the purely qualitative sensation of solidity as signsignifying a quality of external objects, Condillac attempted toexplain how experiences of the sensation of solidity could put us in aposition to infer that we have spatially extended bodies and thatsomething else exists outside of our bodies (TreatiseII.v).

These inferences arise as a consequence of the comparison of twocases, one where a being touches itself, the other where it touchessomething else. A being that touches itself experiences a sensation ofsolidity in its hand and an “answering” sensation ofsolidity in the part of its body that it touches, thereby experiencingitself as being solid, as being two instances of solidity, and asbeing two instances of solidity outside of one another. Were the beingto lift its hand from its body and touch another part of its body, thepair of these sensations would cease and then after a time one memberof the pair would recur in the company of a different partner. Thebeing would experience a new sensation of solidity outside of the oneit receives from its hand, but its awareness of the different bodyparts that it touches would be like its awareness of colours. Thoughexperienced as being outside of one another, the touched body partswould not be experienced as forming a continuum or as spatiallyrelated to one another. However, were the being to move its hand overits body without lifting it, it would experience a continuous sequenceof sensations of solidity arising from different body parts. Movingthe hand repeatedly in the same way would always produce the sameseries of sensations. Condillac did not go into any more detail, buthe seems to have presumed that this would be enough to warrant theinference that the touched body parts coexist and form a continuum.Thus, through moving its hands over itself, the “statue”is supposed to acquire an awareness that it has a spatially extendedbody.

When the “statue” touches another object, it experiencesonly one sensation of solidity without the answering sensation. Theabsence of the second sensation is supposed to induce the judgmentthat there is something else that is solid. An awareness of the shapeof objects and their locations in an ambient space is then developedon this basis. The “statue” subsequently learns toattribute smells and sounds to objects by discovering that movingobjects can make these sensations appear or disappear(Treatise III.i-ii). Moving its hands before its eyes anddiscovering how this causes colour sensations to appear or disappearleads it to think of colour sensations at first as being on thesurface of its eyes, then as being outside of it beyond arm’slength, and then as being on the surfaces of particular tangibleobjects within arms length (Treatise III.iii.1–19).Having reached this stage of development, it is ready to learn toperceive objects to be at even more remote distances throughdiscovering associations between such visual distance cues as theclarity and apparent size of visual images and the distance that mustbe crossed to touch an object. The interpretation of the cues thenbecomes so natural that we seem to be directly seeing depth. Condillacquietly ignored his earlier objections to this position(Treatise III.iii.20–33).

5. The Development of the Higher Cognitive Faculties

Condillac’s account of how sensation gives rise to the exerciseof our higher cognitive faculties is broadly the same in theEssay and theTreatise. Such differences as thereare between the two works arise from Condillac’s decision tofocus theTreatise on pre-linguistic abilities. In theEssay Condillac defined perception as the impression firstoccasioned in the mind by the action of objects on the senses. Hemaintained that we are always conscious of perceptions, but that thisconsciousness comes in varying degrees, which are a function of thestrength with which objects act on the senses, the degree of intrinsicpainfulness or pleasantness of the perception, and, most importantly,the extent to which the perception has been associated with our needs,which are ultimately a function of the pleasure and pain we receivefrom our perceptions. A high degree of consciousness is what we callattention. Our attention is naturally drawn to those perceptions thatare most pleasurable or painful, and consequently to those perceptionsthat we have connected with those that are most pleasurable orpainful. Thus, experience of pleasure and pain is what first instructsus where to focus our attention. Learning where to focus attention isimportant, because many perceptions can be present at once, and aconsciousness that is evenly distributed over a great number ofperceptions knows none of them very clearly or distinctly(Essay I.ii.1. §§1–14).

Those perceptions that we attend to can seem to drown out the othersand produce the illusion that they alone exist, whereas thoseperceptions that we are less conscious of can be so faint that it isimpossible to recall that we have had them the instant after thestimulus that produced them fades. Those perceptions that we attend tocan also continue for some time after the stimulus that produced themhas ceased. This produces an experience that Condillac referred to as“reminiscence” (réminiscence). An objectcontinuously acting on our sense organs causes us to now experience aparticular perception while we are simultaneously conscious of anecho, as it were, of an identical past perception, produced just amoment ago. Condillac’s reasoning is less than explicit at thispoint, but he seems to have taken this experience to provide us withan awareness of what we might call the “pastness” of theecho, and at the same time of the continued existence of an identicalself which experienced both the past perception and the current ones.The idea of self is thus not the product of a Cartesian intellectualintuition. Like the idea of one’s own extended body and of otherextended things, it is discovered through having a particular kind ofsensory experience, in this case, the experience of reminiscence(Essay I.ii.1. §15).

In theEssay, Condillac distinguished between reminiscence,understood as the perception that one is perceiving something that onehas perceived before, and memory. Memory is not the process of formingan image of something one has experienced before. Condillac insteaddescribed it as the process of forming an idea just of signs orcircumstances that have been associated with a previously experiencedobject. The operation of forming an image of a previously experiencedobject is not memory but “imagination,” or reminiscence,if the imagined object is thought of as one that has been experiencedbefore. (Since signs are not discussed in theTreatise, thedistinction between memory and imagination/reminiscence does notappear in that work, and both reminiscence and what theEssaycalls vivid imagination are named “memory.” However, it isnot clear that this is a doctrinal shift as opposed to a mere changeof emphasis mandated by the different project of theTreatise.) Imagination becomes possible once a perception hasbecome familiar from a number of previous experiences, which give themind a facility to repeat that perception at will. The operation ofimagination is enhanced if the perception is simple, composed ofsimple parts that are organized in accord with some guiding principlethat can be invoked in reconstructing it, or customarily connectedwith other, presently occurring perceptions. Since connections withother, customarily connected perceptions need to be noticed, andattention is a function of need, which is in turn established by pastexperience of pleasure and pain, imagination is ultimately a functionof past experience. The same can be said of memory, with thequalification that, insofar as memory involves the recollection ofsigns, its operation also presupposes the ability to make use of signs(Essay I.ii.2–3,Treatise I.ii).

6. Signs and the “Language of Action”

Like Reid after him, Condillac drew a distinction between three kindsof signs: accidental, natural, and instituted (Essay I.ii.4).

Accidental signs are objects or circumstances that have beenfrequently encountered in conjunction with an object, so that theoccurrence of the former induces the mind to imagine the latter.Though he made a great deal of the significance of his employment ofthe principle of association when giving summary presentations of hiswork, one of Condillac’s great shortcomings is his treatment ofassociation. He did little more than employ the term. Unlike Hume, hedid not distinguish between resemblance, contiguity, and cause andeffect, and he offered no detailed analysis of causal association.When compared with Hume’s accounts of how association isresponsible for our beliefs about matters of chance and probability,our trust in testimony, our reliance on general rules, and ourtendencies to allow our reasoning to be influenced by credulity,education, and passion, Condillac’s account of association isvery impoverished.

Natural signs are the cries and gestures that we instinctively produceupon having particular experiences. Unlike Reid, Condillac insistedthat we are not born with a knowledge of the meaning of natural signs;we are only born with the disposition to produce them on certainoccasions. We produce them, moreover, without intending to do so andwithout intending to communicate anything by them. We only discoverthat they have a certain signification through hearing or seeingourselves or others produce the sign on characteristic occasions, andso coming to associate the latter with the former. To go in the otherdirection, and produce the sign in order to induce the thought of somecircumstance in others, would be to use the sign as an institutedrather than a natural sign.

The same might be said of accidental signs. To imagine dawn uponhearing the crow of a cock is to be affected by an accidental sign; toimitate the crow of a cock in order to signify dawn is to institute asign, and is an operation of a higher order.

Reid was later to maintain that the creation of instituted signspresupposes an agreement among a community of speakers, which in turnpresupposes language, and this led him to declare that there must besome language that is innately understood rather than established byconvention. But Condillac had already explained how an artificiallanguage can be instituted without innately understood signs(Essay II.i.1. §§1–4). Familiarity with thesignification of natural signs, which are instinctively produced butnot innately understood, will lead one to think of the sign uponwitnessing the object that it signifies. For example, having learnedto associate the cries that are made by those attacked by a wildanimal with those circumstances, I will think of those cries uponseeing a wild animal approach and think of the effect that hearingthem has previously had on myself and others. It is then a small, butmomentous step to utter those cries in order, first, to signify theapproach of a wild animal to others and induce them to flee, and thento signify this particular danger to oneself or others withoutbothering to imagine an approaching wild animal, as a way ofabbreviating the process of thought. With this step, a move is madefrom being affected by accidental and natural signs we happen tochance upon in the course of experience to employing instituted signsto stand for experiences. The first stage in taking this step is thedevelopment of what Condillac called the “language ofaction,” a language composed of cries and gestures culled fromnatural language. A spoken language of arbitrary sounds and a writtenlanguage are then gradually invented by users of the language ofaction (Essay II.i.1. §§5–8).

Since memory just is the imagination of signs, the development ofinstituted signs makes memory possible (natural and accidental signsare only ever sensed, not remembered). The institution of signsfurther allows us to set up names for groups of ideas that are toocomplicated to be distinctively yet collectively imagined, such asideas of any number larger than six, of substances, of complex modes(notably moral and aesthetic qualities) and of genera and species ofthings (Essay I.iv). It is also supposed to give us controlover our imagination and an ability to govern our attention(Essay I.ii.4. §46). This allows us to reflect on otheraspects of our experience than those most immediately related to ourneeds. Reflection brings connections between objects to our attentionthat we would not otherwise notice and puts us in a position to refineour language by instituting names for what we have discovered. A morerefined language facilitates yet more exact reflection, and languageand our reflective capacities proceed to work in tandem to develop ourcognitive abilities to their highest level (EssayI.ii.5).

7. Languages as Analytic Methods

In later works (Treatise of Animals [1755],Grammar,part of theCourse of Study for the Prince of Parma, [1768],andLogic [1780]), Condillac explained more clearly thetransition from a language of natural signs to the language of actionmade up of institutional signs.

He explicitly distinguished two types of “language ofaction.” The first one is “natural” (and thusappears to correspond to the use of natural signs also described intheEssay). Its signs depend on the conformation of theorgans (Treatise of Animals II. 4,Grammar I.1,Logic II.2). As a consequence, different species of animalshave a different natural language insofar as they have differentorgans (Treatise of Animals II.4). This language is innate inits expression since different signs are naturally caused by differentideas independently of any learning. However, the interpretation ofthis language is not innate: we have to learn to interpret its signs(Grammar I.1,Logic II.2). (Strictly speaking,cries, facial expressions, and gestures are signs only insofar as weinterpret them: before any interpretation they are just the effects onour body of some ideas occurring in our minds.) The second type oflanguage of action is institutional or artificial. Condillac makesclear that its signs are artificial but they are not arbitrary(Grammar I.1). They are not arbitrary because they are chosenaccording to a rule of analogy with the natural signs(Grammar I.1,Logic II.2).

The transition from the natural language of action to theinstitutional language of action is a gradual process dictated by theneed to analyze natural signs. As Condillac explains, there is nosuccession of various ideas in the mind of the speaker of the naturallanguage of action: the idea of the external object affecting him orher, a judgment about the object, and the passions it arouses occurmore or less at the same time. In a similar fashion their visible andaudible natural signs (the gestures, facial expressions, and criesmade) occur more or less at the same time, although the beginning of adecomposition of these signs is already prompted by the merespatio-temporal constraints of any visible action: it takes some timeto jump around or to extend one own’s arm. Let’s imagine asituation in which we have a speaker of the natural language and itsfirst interpreter. In the presence of an animal, previouslyexperienced as dangerous, the speaker goes into a fright. The actionthat follows appears to be confused to the interpreter, since it isthe immediate expression of a variety of ideas all occurring at thesame time in the mind of the speaker. The desire to understand leadsthe interpreter to the beginning of an analysis of the action and, asa consequence, to an analysis of ideas: for example, the attention ofthe interpreter is drawn first to the object pointed at by thespeaker’s finger and then to speaker’s face expressingfear. The related ideas that were simultaneous in the mind of thespeaker become successive for the interpreter. The success and failureof the interpreter incites the speaker to be clear to herself and toothers: the speaker is motivated to analyze her own ideas so that shemay break down the corresponding visible and audible signs and bebetter understood. This breaking down of signs makes the job easierfor the interpreter who in her turn replies by decomposing her owngestures in accordance with the analysis of ideas. This gradualprocess of decomposition or articulation of gestures, cries, andfacial expressions marks the passage from a natural language of actionto an institutional language of action (Grammar I.1 &I.7,Logic II.2).

Thus, language of action and analysis of ideas mutually enrich eachother, according to a hierarchy of needs (at first, communication willbe about food and immediate dangers). The decomposing of signsmatching the analysis of ideas leads to the creation of new signs,following a rule of analogy with the signs already known and thisprocess allows the consideration of further ideas. Conversely, noconsideration of more refined ideas would be possible without thecorresponding signs. An example that Condillac favors is that of thesystem of numeration based on the ten fingers, which allows for theprogress of arithmetic: a single finger is first used to designate theunit but can subsequently be used for designating 10, 100, and so on(Language of Calculi I.1).

From the primitive artificial language of action a language ofarticulated sounds emerged, as Condillac had already explained indetail in theEssay: cries of different tonality were deemedsuitable to express different emotions. This phenomenon is at theorigin of the tonal accent of Greek and Latin, which Condillac took tobe closer to the first spoken languages of humanity. Onomatopeia, hespeculated, may have been at the origin of certain words used todesignate certain things, while other words were chosen by way ofanalogy: for example, words for mental operations originally indicatedwords for the operations of the sense-organs (Essay II.i.2-3,Grammar I.7). Grammar gradually emerged, first reflecting themost basic needs of humanity and then gaining in complexity as needsmultiplied. (Condillac makes the conjecture that in the syntax ofthese first languages the object of the action came first and precededthe verb, since the object was the most vital point of interest forprimitive people:Essay II.i.9,Grammar II.8)

The first spoken languages of humanity combined a language ofarticulated sounds with the language of action. They resembled more akind of chant accompanied by a “dance” of gestures andsteps: this fact also explains why a Roman or Greek orator could beunderstood by a large crowd of people, while a modern Frenchman couldnot (Essay II.i.1-3).

After a phase in which the language of action had been fruitfullycombined with the language of articulated sounds, different elementsof this mix began to develop autonomously. They also recombined laterin various guises. On this basis, Condillac attempted to account forthe development of arts and forms of expression such as music, dance,theatre, poetry. For example, the language of action can dispensealtogether with sounds of any kind, while extending the range of itsexpressive gestures: already impressed by accounts of ancientpantomimes, Condillac saw this point confirmed by the moderndevelopment of the language of signs for deaf-and-dumb people in theschool of the Abbé de l’Epée (EssayII.i.4,Grammar I.1). By developing only the tonal part ofthe sounds, the language of action can turn into music, unaccompaniedby any words and gestures (Essay II.i.5).

The details of this account of the development of arts are highlydebatable, but Condillac thought that on its basis he had been able toexplain the reasons for some disputes in art criticism. Whateverworked for an ancient language does not work for a modern languagethat has shed most of its language of action component. Thus we shouldnot expect modern tragedy in French to replicate modes of expressionprecisely designed for a more expressive language like that of ancienttragedy. (Essay II.i.3)

The transition from the natural language of action to the artificiallanguage of action and from this latter to the language of articulatesounds is recapitulated in an amplified form in the general movementof arts and civilization away from primitive forms of languages thatare more expressive of emotions towards forms of language that aremore descriptive. All historical languages can be considered as“analytic methods,” since their grammar, prosody, andvocabulary reflect a certain stage in the development of analysis.However, in the formation of historical languages variouscontingencies such as the climate and the temper of people played arole. Historical languages contain many errors made in the analysis offacts and these errors are passed on from generation to generation(Grammar I.1-8,Logic II.3-4). Science should striveto be based on a “well-formed language.” Late in his life,Condillac took algebra to be the best model of such a well-formedlanguage (Logic II.5). In algebra we show clearly and by alimited number of steps how to find certain unknown quantities givencertain known quantities. Condillac took himself to have donesomething similar for philosophy. What is initially known issensation. Condillac took himself to have shown in his work thegenesis of all mental life from this primitive element (LogicII.7-8).

8. The Animal Soul, Moral Laws, and Immortality

At the beginning theEssay, Condillac demonstrated that thesoul is immaterial, in opposition to Locke’s hypothesis ofthinking matter. According to Condillac, God cannot give to matter thepower to think. The operations of thought show by themselves the unityof consciousness, and the unity of consciousness is only accountableby presupposing a simple and indivisible subject of inherence forconsciousness itself. Condillac presents this line of argument bysaying that individual perceptions are indivisible in their nature andso they cannot inhere in different substances. Even assuming that eachindividual perception inheres in a separate individual substance, theact of comparing perceptions could not occur without a simple andindivisible substratum. “However, a mass matter is not one; itis a multitude” or, as Condillac also said, matter is anassemblage or collection of things (Essay I.i.1 §6).Therefore, the soul must be an immaterial substance.

At the same time, Condillac made clear that after the fall of thefirst man and woman the soul has become dependent on the body: thebuilding blocks of mental life, sensations, are occasioned by variousphysical motions caused by the external objects affecting the sensesand the nervous system (Essay I.i.1 §8). If highercognitive functions are ultimately to be explained merely in terms oftransformations of sensations, then Condillac was left with theproblem of showing the precise line of demarcation between humans andother animals. Two solutions to this problem were foreclosed toCondillac. One possible solution was the view of Aristotle: the humansoul is characterized by a higher rational part in addition to thevegetative and animal parts (the vegetative part being responsible fornutrition and growth, and the animal part being responsible forsensation and motion). Condillac’s sensism argued preciselyagainst this essentialist view of the difference between higher andlower cognitive functions and by extension against the essentialistview of the difference between humans and animals. The secondsolution, which in Condillac’s times was proposed by Buffon in hisNatural History (1749-53), was the Cartesian hypothesis of amechanical soul. According to Descartes, only the rational soul isresponsible for consciousness. Animals, being devoid of this kind ofsoul, are mere machines and thus incapable of being conscious.Condillac, on his part, was rather inclined to endorse thecommon-sense view that makes animals capable of sensation and thus ofconsciousness.

In theEssay, Condillac had identified the use of language asnecessary for higher cognitive functions, including memory, thecontrol of the imagination, and reflection. Animals, which at besthave the use of natural signs, can only recall (imagine) absentobjects if a present object has been habitually associated with them.Unable to use at will signs standing for absent objects, they arewithout memory. Thus they live from moment to moment, without anyproper notion of a continued past existence in which various eventsare connected. Everyday is like a new day for them, and they simplyrepeat habitual patterns of behaviour most conducive to theirsurvival. They are at best capable of what Condillac calls‘reminiscence’ and thus they can recognize an object aspreviously experienced. The case of a boy who grew up among bears inthe woods between Lithuania and Poland appeared to provideconfirmation for animals’ mental inferiority: found unable tospeak, this youth only gradually learned the language, and afterwardscould not recall his past life nor did he have any notion of havingspent many years in the woods (Essay I.iv.2§§23-25). Another case, that of a deaf-and-dumb boy whosuddenly recovered his hearing, further confirmed Condillac’shypothesis: after a period of learning, the boy confirmed that whilehe was deaf he could not attach any meaning to the sign of the crossthat he saw his parents doing, nor did he have any notion of death,life after death, or God (Essay I.iv.2 §§13-22).(Condillac regretted that the examiners of the case had asked the boymerely about his religious beliefs.) Subsequently, as is evident inhis correspondence with Cramer and Maupertuis, Condillac had come tobelieve that he had drawn too sharp a line between lower and highercognitive functions and that thus he had in effect reintroduced adualism of reason and sensation in the mind.

Condillac addressed this problem in theTreatise ofSensations by recognizing a level of pre-linguistic reflectionthat is common to animals and human beings. At the same time,Condillac insisted drawing a distinction between the pre-linguisticcapacities of human beings and those of animals. He described atlength how the statue acquires the ideas of extended objects by touchand how it comes to refer the causes of sensations received by theother senses to these objects. Touch is considered as a sort ofpre-linguistic instrument of analysis: it originally discriminatesparts outside of parts in its objects and by its means, sensationsbecome ideas, that is, they acquire a reference to external objects.Condillac then argued that animals must be inferior to humans becausetheir sense of touch is not as developed as that of human beings. Hethought that human hands and fingers are uniquely adapted to receivinga multiplicity of different impressions and therefore the human senseof touch is able to discriminate more accurately the qualities ofobjects than that of other animals. From this difference of degree,Condillac went on to argue for a difference of kind between the soulof animals and that of humans: God in his benevolence would not trap asoul capable of superior operations in an inferior body like that ofanimals; therefore, the soul of animals must be of an inferior kind(Treatise, The Plan of This Work, Note).

In theTreatise of Animals Condillac further developed hisviews. He repeated what he had said in theTreatise ofSensations: animals are capable of pre-linguistic reflection,just like humans. They judge and compare ideas and by these meansdiscover how to do things necessary for their survival. By this kindof reflection, all animals learn the proper use of their organs, inorder to flee what is dangerous and search what is useful to them.Reflection is at the origin of the formation habits, like the one thatmakes us avoid a falling object that is heavy. As the actionsoriginally done deliberately by reflection are gradually turned intohabits, “the animal touches, sees, walks without reflecting onwhat it is doing” (Treatise of Animals, II.1). Thus,the more habits are formed, the less need there is for reflection.What is called instinct in animals is not an innate pattern ofbehaviour, but rather a well-developed habit (Treatise ofAnimals II.5). This habit bears witness to the effort ofinventive reflection that originally taught animals the use of theirorgans: birds have to learn how build their nests and beavers have tolearn how to build their shelters (Treatise of AnimalsII.2).

Condillac, however, thinks animals are less inventive than humansbecause they have fewer needs and also “fewer means to multiplytheir own ideas and make combinations of all sort” (Treatiseof Animals, II.2). In different words, animals are more easilysatisfied with their lot and they are less intelligent. Contrary towhat many authors say, animals of the same species do not do the samethings because they imitate each other. Rather, they all end up doingthe same things, because they have the same needs and the same organsperfectly suited to the satisfaction of those needs. Thus, each animalacquires the same habits as any other animal of the same species,whether placed alone or in company. Paradoxically, humans end up beingdifferent from each other precisely because they are the only animalsthat imitate each other. There is relatively little communication ofideas by way of language among animals: their needs are more limitedand therefore they do not need to learn from each other as much ashumans do. Humans, on the contrary, desire to learn from each othermore and so imitate each other. As they communicate more with eachother, they also discover the differences in their talents andinterests and put them to use for themselves and others (Treatiseof Animals II.3). Animals keep to their subsistence economy,while humans develop a system of division of labour in order tosatisfy their needs: one might start by trying to be a skilled hunterlike his neighbour only to discover that he had better leave huntingto his neighbor and concentrate on the manufacture of bows and arrows.Since, individuals are often placed in different circumstancesrequiring different solutions, new needs emerge. As new needs emerge,useful discoveries are made and social ties get stronger. Just like intheEssay, the intertwined factors of language and socialintercourse make humans superior to animals in their capacities.

The difference between humans and animals is still characterized byCondillac as difference of degree. For example, animals have a naturallanguage of action, just like humans, and they use it to communicatewith each other their needs and to help each other. The signs of thislanguage vary among different species not only according to thedifferent ideas they have but also according to the variety of organs(external conformation) they possess, since these organs condition theway ideas can be expressed. Animals of different species whoseexternal conformation resembles each other can communicate with eachother, at least to a certain extent: Condillac describes the case ofdogs that can go as far as understanding not simply the language ofaction but also the language of articulate sounds of humans. Butanimals whose external conformation is widely different from ourscannot communicate with us, as the case of the parrot shows: it canarticulate sounds, but both his ideas and his language of action iswidely different from ours (Treatise of Animals II.4).

Condillac seems to have thought that only humans have organs thatallow for the language of action to be relatively more expressive,thus keeping a kind of parallelism between the cognitive capacities ofthe mind and the complexity of the structure of the body (a complexitynot simply reducible to that of the brain but also including that ofthe peripheral organs).

What ultimately sets apart humans from animals is the knowledge of Godand morals. In the middle of theTreatise of Animals,Condillac inserts a long chapter he claims to have submitted as ananonymous dissertation to the Academy of Berlin just a few yearsbefore. Here Condillac proceeds to demonstrate the existence of God.Condillac insists on a natural progression of ideas: at first, humansrealized that their happiness or unhappiness depended completely onexternal causes and posited deities equivalent to the powers ofnature. Then they came to posit a first cause in order to avoid aninfinite regression in explanation of these natural powers. Finally,the presence of design leads them to recognize this cause asintelligent and free (Treatise of Animals II.6). While thedetails of this chapter are not original, they set the stage forCondillac’s moral argument for the immortality of the soul.

Condillac first insists on the spontaneous emergence of moral laws.The more humans reflect on their common needs, the more they realizehow necessary it is to help each other and refrain from certain kindsof action. Thus “they come to agree on what is allowed and whatis forbidden, and their conventions become laws to which action mustbe subordinated: this is the beginning of morality”(Treatise of Animals, II.7).

At first they think of these laws as conventions they designed toenhance their well-being, given the needs that they have and thescarcity of means to satisfy them. But as they discover the existenceof God, they recognize that God, by disposing of everything in nature,is the ultimate source of goods and evils that may befall humanbeings. Moral laws then acquire a providential meaning: by obeyingthese laws, humans obey God himself, who is the author of nature. Thelaws of morality are both natural laws and laws of divine institution,since nature is God’s creation. But given that the proportion ofgoods and evils in this life does not correspond to the merits anddemerits of individuals, it is necessary to postulate a life afterdeath where the just will be rewarded and the wicked will bepunished.

Thus, According to Condillac, the immortality of the human soul is nota consequence of its immateriality. All created beings, whetherimmaterial or material, are naturally contingent: “if weconsider only the nature of the soul, it can cease to be. Who createdit can let it go back to nothingness. It will continue to exist onlybecause God is just. But in this way immortality is guaranteed to thesoul as if it were a consequence of its essence” (Treatiseof Animals II.7). Immortality is guaranteed to the human soulsince the human soul is capable of knowing God’s laws and God issupremely just: only in this derivative sense, “immortality isguaranteed to the soulas if it were a consequence of itsessence.”

Unlike human beings, animals are incapable of knowing moral laws. Godhas not granted them the means to distinguish between what is rightand what is wrong and so “he has shown that he does not expectanything from them” (Treatise of Animals II.7).“Nothing is enjoined and nothing is forbidden to beasts. Theironly rule is force. Incapable of merit and demerit, they have no rightto divine justice. Their soul is thus mortal” (Treatise ofAnimals II.7). But the soul of animals is immaterial, just likethe one of humans. Thus, we see how Condillac was able to separate thequestion of the immateriality of the soul from the question of theimmortality of the soul.

An objection could be raised against Condillac: if small children, whoare still too young to know moral laws, suffer and die, would they berewarded in the afterlife as compensation for their sufferings? Andshould we not think the same of animals, who are like small children,suffering and yet incapable of knowledge of moral laws? Condillacappears not to have appreciated the strength of this objection: forhim, the sufferings of animals are either a means to warn them ofdanger or a necessary consequence of the laws of nature instituted byGod. That an analogy could be drawn to children or mentally disabledpeople is not considered by Condillac.

9. Commerce and Government

In theTreatise of Sensations, Condillac said that “Thewords ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’ express theproperties through which things contribute to our pleasure. As aresult, every sentient being has ideas of goodness and of beautiesrelative to himself” (Treatise IV.iii.1). He furthersaid that “the good and the beautiful are not at all absolute: theyare relative to the nature of the man who judges them and to hismakeup” (Treatise, IV.iii.3). He clarified in a footnotethat he was not referring to goodness and beauty in themselves butabout the judgments that a man, who lives alone (as the statue of theTreatise of Sensations), may make of them: not everythingthat such a man judges as good will be morally good, nor everything hejudges beautiful will be really beautiful. Indeed we have seen thatCondillac thought that people in society could come to an agreementabout moral laws and that these should be taken as objectively valid.At the same time, Condillac insisted on a certain degree of relativityin the estimation of goods and evils. The human stage of developmentis characterized by a multiplication of needs, and it appears thatthis by itself would allow for a variety in preferences, given thedifferent conditions of people. Humans are the first creatures thatcan turn self-love in a proper desire for self-preservation, sinceanimals cannot have the notion of death. But humans may conceive of avariety of ways of satisfying the same material needs. Moreover, theirneeds multiply well beyond the mere material sphere ofself-preservation. To describe this potentially unlimited developmentof needs, Condillac went as far as to say that even if humans wereable to satisfy all their needs they would still be unable to satisfytheir most pressing need, which is the need to desire (Treatise ofAnimals II.8).

In one of his later works,Commerce and Government (1776),Condillac considered what he took to be some of the economic andpolitical implications of his views. The book was published threemonths before Adam Smith’sWealth of Nations, and it isrightly considered a milestone in the tradition oflaissez-faire economics and classical liberalism.

Condillac began with an examination of economic value, which hethought was determined by the utility and relative scarcity of a good(Commerce and Government I.1). Since people in differentsituations of life estimate goods differently, social cooperationbased on the division of labour becomes possible through the market.As Condillac said, thus anticipating by one century the insights ofmarginalists, in every voluntary market transaction each party giveswhat he or she values less in exchange for what he or she values more(Commerce and Government I.6). It follows that every freeexchange is to the mutual benefit of both parties. Condillac justifiedproperty rights in a Lockian fashion by original occupation,appropriation by labour, or voluntary transfer (Commerce andGovernment I.12). The government’s main task is to maintain theorder of society both internally and externally (Commerce andGovernment I.10), but the welfare of citizens is betterguaranteed by the removal of barriers to free enterprise and freetrade, as Condillac argued at length in the second part of the work.Government’s various “blows” against the freedom ofcommerce, such as taxes on consumption, monopolies, cartels, tradebarriers, price controls, currency manipulations, public debt, andwars, only benefit a few privileged people who are politicallyconnected. Economic interventionism leads to an unhealthy and“excessive” multiplication of needs in the group of peopleprivileged by these measures. This multiplication of needs ismanifested by the rise in the consumption of luxury products(Commerce and Government I.27, preface to Part II, II.16).(This unhealthy and excessive multiplication of needs, manifested by ataste for luxury, should be contrasted with the healthy development ofneeds that characterizes the rise of humans above the mere level ofanimal economy described by Condillac in theTreatise ofAnimals.) On the other hand, economic interventionism pushes backthe majority into a sort of animal economy, where they are constantlythreatened by poverty and starvation. Thus, policies of economicintervention exacerbate social inequalities. The equilibratingmechanism of the market would mitigate inequalities by lowering theprices of goods thanks to open competition among entrepreneurs(Commerce and Government II.1). Whatever inequalities remainin a free market society would just reflect a difference in talentsand would rather be to the benefit of all. Certainly, the desire forhuman welfare cannot legitimately justify measures such as pricecontrols on goods of first necessity such as wheat. These measures arenot only unjust but also turn out to be counterproductive,notwithstanding the best intentions of advocates of restrictions onprivate property rights: “The rights of humanity opposed to those ofproperty! What gibberish!” (Commerce and GovernmentII.15)

10. Problems with Condillac’s Sensationism

10.1 Idealism

In theEssay Condillac not only claimed that sensations areoccasioned by the action of external objects on our sense organs, butalso that they are images or representations of those objects. Moreprecisely, he claimed that the objects that affect our sense organsmust be extended and hence material things, though they may not havethe precise shapes or sizes that our senses represent them as having,and though they do not have colours on their surfaces or bearqualities of smell and taste (Essay I.i.2.§§11–12). But if “we never leave ourselves andnever perceive anything other than our own thoughts,” asCondillac claimed at the outset of theEssay (I.i.1.§1), then what could entitle us to maintain that our sensationsbear this degree of resemblance to external objects or that there evenis an external world containing objects that occasion our sensations?

In theEssay, Condillac contented himself with replying tothis question by claiming that while we have a clear idea what itmeans to attribute extension to an object, we have no clear idea whatit means to say that objects are coloured or scented, and that whilethere is evidence that proves that we do not always perceive the sizesor shapes of objects correctly, there is no evidence that proves thatwe are wrong to think that external objects have some form ofextension (Essay I.i.2. §§11–13). Neitherclaim is compelling. Indeed, it is astounding how someone familiarwith Descartes’s dreaming argument could have made the latterone. But both were asserted without any further elaboration ordefence. As Diderot later pointed out in hisLetter on theBlind, for Condillac to rest his case against scepticism aboutthe existence of an external world on such facile grounds was toignore the powerful reasons for denying the existence of materialthings that had been articulated by Berkeley.

This is not a problem that Condillac rectified in theTreatise. Instead, he attempted to side-step it by focusingjust on the question of how experience leads us to form the idea thatthere are extended, external objects that bear the qualities ofcolour, taste, and smell exhibited in our sensations, while eschewingany over-confident metaphysical claims about the extent to which thisidea may be correct. Indeed, towards close of theTreatise headmitted that the question of whether material things exist is not onethat we are in any position to answer. We cannot be sure that objectsare extended, shaped, and mobile, yet colourless, odourless, andtasteless. For all we know the objects that cause our sensations maynot only be extended and solid, but endowed with qualities thatresemble our sensations of smell, taste, and colour. Or they may benot only colourless, odourless, and tasteless but unextended(Treatise IV.v).

However, Condillac had no right to simply-side step the metaphysicalquestion of the nature of body. His account of how touch instructs theeyes to see figures and locations describes the hands as extendedobjects that move through space and touch various parts of theextended surfaces of the eyes (Treatise III.iii.1–9).One cannot remain agnostic about whether spatially extended objectsreally exist if one’s theory of perception presupposes thatone’s sense organs are themselves extended and mobile.

10.2 Materialism

Condillac’s account of sensation also fit uneasily with hisclaim that the mind is immaterial. He took sensations to bemodifications of the mind’s being. He also stipulated that suchthings as colours and scents are sensations. In theEssay, hespecified that there is nothing in bodies that resembles colours orscents and that these qualities are something that belongs to sentientcreatures alone (Essay I.i.2. §12). In theTreatise, employing a striking turn of phrase, he claimedthat while we might think of a being who possessed only the sense ofsmell as a being who scents a rose, for itself this being will simplybe the smell of a rose. “From its perspective,” he wrote,“the odours are nothing other than its own modifications ormanners of being” (Treatise I.i.2). The same holds ofcolours. A being whom we would describe as seeing red would at firstexperience itself as simply being red. Touch would instruct it toattribute this redness to other objects. But this instruction cannotbe known to be correct, whereas there can be no question that thesensation of red is a modification of the being of a sentientcreature. Red is not, therefore, what might be called the intentionalobject of an act of sensing, or if it is, it is so only derivatively;it is primarily a quality of the sentient being, who experiencesitself as literally turning red when it has this sensation(Treatise I.xi.8).

The problem with this position becomes clear when it is consideredthat Condillac also maintained that colours are extended. In theEssay he claimed that were we to have no other sensationsthan those of light and colour they would “trace(traceront) extension, lines, and figures before oureyes” so that we would find these ideas to be contained in oursensations (Essay I.i.2. §9). Moreover, this discoveryis not an effect of learning or association. Extension and shape areoriginal features possessed by visual sensations, discernible simplyby attentive reflection. Someone blind since birth and newly made tosee would not originally perceive everything before him as if it werea “point” (i.e., an unextended spot of colour), but wouldexperience “light distributed (répandue) inevery direction [outwards as well as above, below, to the left and tothe right]” (Essay I.vi. §§12, 14). Condillaccontinued to retain this view in theTreatise, though withsome refinements: Whereas in theEssay he had maintained thatcolours are extended over all three dimensions, in theTreatise he endorsed the Berkeleyan position that we learn toperceive depth. He also maintained that we do not immediatelyappreciate that colours are bounded and figured even in twodimensions, but need to learn that they have these features. But hecontinued to maintain that the colours we originally experience areextended over two dimensions. “Colour presents [offre]extension to the soul that it modifies,” he wrote in theTreatise, “because it is itself extended. This is afact that cannot be brought into doubt. It is demonstrated byobservation” (Treatise I.xi.8). Insofar as colours areextended they must have shapes, even if those shapes are notimmediately perceived. The process of learning to perceive shape doesnot transform our colour sensations and lead them to acquireproperties they did not previously have; it merely leads us todiscover ones that were there all along. This is the point of claimingthat not everything that is necessarily involved with a sensation needbe perceived by it.

Condillac thus appears to have been committed to four mutuallyantagonistic propositions:

Colours are extended.
Colours are sensations.
Sensations are modifications of the mind’s being.
The mind is unextended.

Hume had confronted the conflict between these propositions by denying(3) and (4). For Hume, our visual impressions are compounds thatconsist of a number of minimally visible, coloured points that aredisposed alongside another in space, but the notion that impressionsand ideas inhere in some mental substance is unintelligible, whetherthis substance is taken to be material or immaterial. Reid, incontrast, had insisted on (3) and (4) but had declared that the term“colour” is used equivocally in (1) and (2). We experiencesensations of colour, which are unextended states of feelingexperienced by the mind in just the same way as it experiencesfeelings of pleasure or pain. But colour terminology is most oftenused to refer to some unknown thing in external objects that causes usto experience these sensations. These external, so-called“coloured” objects are conceived as being extended andfigured, but the mind does not become aware of them by contemplatingsome internal, iconic representation or image. It has a thought thatrefers to them. Affection of our sense organs does not produce animpression or image; it occasions a thought. The thought itself isunextended, like the mind whose state it is, but it is a thoughtof orabout an object. The object is thought topossess a quality of extension, as well as to be a cause of a certainconcomitant sensation of colour. But the thoughtthat thisobject is extended and a cause of a sensation of colour is itselfneither extended nor coloured. So for Reid, either“colours” are powers in extended, external objects tobring about sensations in us, in which case they are not sensationshad by the mind, or they are sensations had by the mind, in which casethey are not extended.

However, unlike Hume and Reid, Condillac was unwilling to deny orqualify any of (1)-(4). Unlike Hume, he insisted on the existence ofan immaterial mind who is the subject of sensations of colour(Essay I.i.1. §6). And unlike Reid, he insisted thatcolours are unequivocally both modifications of the mind’s beingand literally extended. These commitments exposed him to charges oftacit materialism. Most notably, René Réaumur, writingunder the pseudonym of the Abbé de Lignac, observed in thesupplements to hisLettres à un Américan(1756), that just as Condillac had accused Buffon of supposing thatmachines have a quality that is essential to spirits, sensibility, soCondillac was liable to the charge of supposing that spirits have aquality that belongs uniquely to machines, three dimensionality.

Condillac’s response to this charge, in his “Lettre de M.l’abbé de Condillac à l’auteur des Lettresà un Américan” (1756, and appended to subsequenteditions of theTreatise on Animals) was to claim that,“If I say that our sensations give us an idea of extension, itis only because we take them for qualities of objects when we referthem to something external. But I have proven many times that theycertainly do not give us this idea when we consider them as a mannerof being of our soul.” This echoes claims made in theEssay and theTreatise. In theEssay,Condillac claimed that we attribute the extension or shape we find incolours to something outside of us rather than to ourselves consideredas thinking subjects (I.i.2. §11), presumably because extensionis incompatible with the simplicity that must be ascribed to athinking being. In almost the same breath, he claimed that we arewrong to imagine that the chromatic quality of colours (as opposed tothe extension and shape they map out) actually lies on the surface ofexternal objects, purportedly because we have no clear idea of what itwould mean for a body to be coloured (I.i.2. §12). But suchclaims are hardly adequate to avoid the problem and perhaps not evencoherent. Either the chromatic qualities that we experience asmodifications of our being are extended or they are not. If they areextended, then the claim that we do not recognize this fact when wethink of them as modifications of our own being is merely an evasion.If they are not extended, then if we never experience anything otherthan our own sensations, as Condillac claimed at the outset of theEssay, it is mysterious how we come to attribute extension toexternal objects.

In theTreatise, Condillac was no longer willing to declarethat objects can be known to be either extended or colourless. Hesimply claimed that its experiences would lead his“statue” to first conceive of colours as modifications ofits own being, then to conceive them as modifications of its extendedsense organs, and finally to conceive them as modifications ofexternal objects (Treatise III.3). But this was not to answerthe metaphysical problem but rather to ignore it. If colours are infact extended, as theTreatise continued to insist, yet themind ultimately only knows its own sensations, however variously theymight be transformed by cognitive processing, then we can only come tobe in a position to attribute colours to external objects if we firstexperience those colours, which suggests that they must modify ourbeing.

Though Condillac’s official reply to the charge of materialism,as expressed in the letter to Lignac, is something of adisappointment, scholars have occasionally read theTreatiseas taking some steps towards a more radical way of dealing with theproblem. Recall that in that work Condillac advanced the view thateven though colours are in fact extended and bounded, it is notintuitively evident that they are. We need to learn to see theirshapes. Interestingly, what teaches us to see these shapes are tactilesensations of solidity and observations of the appearance anddisappearance of colours consequent upon moving our hands before oureyes. Since neither sensations of solidity nor the tactile sensationsthat accompany hand motions are patently extensive in character, andcolours themselves might as well not be so far as the early learner isconcerned, some scholars have suggested that the Condillac of theTreatise meant to claim that our perceptions of space areconstructed from raw data that, as they are at first experienced bythe mind, are in no way spatial. Insofar as theTreatise doesmove towards this more radical view, it can be seen as a precursor ofsuch 19th century Berkeleyan theories of vision as those of Steinbuch,Mill, Helmholtz, and Wundt. However, those later theories invokednotions of local signs (sensations specific to which nerve is beingstimulated) and made explicit appeals to kinaesthetic sensations thatare simply absent from Condillac’s work. Lacking those notions,Condillac claimed that an awareness of space cannot be generated fromaspatial sensations, and he represented his statue, not asconstructing space, but as discovering the spatial features that werealready present in its sensations from the first. Viewing him as aprecursor of 19th century Berkeleyanism risks overlooking this factand, as a consequence, misrepresenting his thought.

10.3 Memory and Liberty

In both theEssay and theTreatise Condillac set outto show that all of our cognitive and conative faculties are generatedfrom sensation and can be derived from that operation alone. To thisend he identified perception, consciousness, and attention as allbeing different aspects of the one operation of sensation. Perceptionis the impression sensation makes upon the mind, consciousness is thisimpression considered as something experienced by the mind, andattention is simply a more vivid perception. But when Condillac cameto account for memory and reminiscence, this project stalled. It isnot implausible to maintain that a sensation might continue to beexperienced after the object that occasioned it has ceased to act onthe sense organ. But such an “echo” of a past sensation isitself a present phenomenon. It might be fainter than other sensationsthat are now occurring, but being experienced to be faint is not thesame thing as being thought to have originated in the past. Ratherthan explain how sensation can give rise to an awareness of pastnessCondillac simply helped himself to the notion. In theEssay,he defined “reminiscence” as the awareness that aperception has been had “before” without anywhereexplaining how the idea that one thing can be “before”another could arise simply from sensation (Essay I.ii.1.§15). In theTreatise he distinguished the memory of asensation from a current sensation by calling the former “weaklysensing what one was (sentir foiblement ce qu’elle aété)” and the latter “vividly sensingwhat one is (sentir vivement ce qu’elle est).”But then he immediately went on to say that recalled sensations cansometimes be more vivid than current ones (TreatiseI.ii.8–9). So what necessarily distinguishes rememberedsensation from current sensation, on this account, is just thatremembered sensations are of what “was.” But this is notto explain how we could get the idea that a sensation is of what wasas opposed to what is.

Similar difficulties arise in connection with the will. In theEssay, Condillac supposed that the imagination is initiallyoutside of our control. Unless driven by need to conceive the means ofachieving an end, we imagine what we do only because in the course ofexperience we sense accidental or natural signs that suggestparticular ideas to us. The use of instituted signs is supposed tochange this circumstance and give us a new ability to control ourthoughts (Essay I.ii.4.§§45–46). But it isnot clear why this should be the case (note, in this regard, theapparent contradiction betweenEssay I.ii.4. §39 and§46). Just because a being has acquired the ability to producesigns in order to induce thought, it does not follow that this abilitymust be under the subject’s voluntary control, and if theproduction of instituted signs is outside of our control, it is notclear how their use can give us a power to control our thoughts.

The “sensationist” label notwithstanding, there is somesuggestion that Condillac may have taken both memory and volition tobe primitive functions of the soul that are not in fact reducible tosensation. In theEssay he described our awareness of thetemporal sequence of our perceptions as a “fundamentalexperience (première expérience)”(Essay I.ii.1. §15) and in the Dissertation on Liberty(§§9–10) he seems to have taken freedom of choice andthe ability to spontaneously direct attention to be original abilitiesthat the soul has whenever it is not impelled by some pressingneed.

These views of memory and will are not necessarily inconsistent withCondillac’s sensationism, his repeated claims to derive all themind’s capacities from the operation of sensationnotwithstanding. There are stronger and weaker ways of understandingCondillac’s sensationism. On the stronger understanding,Condillac meant to say that sensation produces all of the othercapacities of the soul. On the weaker understanding, he only meant tosay that sensation instructs us in the proper employment of ourcapacities. The weaker reading is compatible with allowing original,irreducible powers of memory and free choice, provided that we takethose powers to be ones that we do not at first know how toeffectively direct or employ. The stronger reading attributes anabsolutely rigorous empiricism to Condillac — one that does notadmit that the mind is endowed with any innate abilities. It is notclear what Condillac would have had to gain by insisting on such arigorous empiricism. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas andinnate principles was bound up with a reaction to unquestionedauthority and a demand that all knowledge claims be demonstrable byappeal to common experience. But allowing that we possess innatecognitive capacities and innate conative abilities does not interferewith this demand, particularly if we stress, as the weak reading does,that we need to learn how to employ these capacities and abilities,and that experience serves as our best and only true teacher. Thepedagogical and methodological conclusions that Condillac most wantedto draw still follow from that qualification, without having to invokethe strong reading.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Condillac’s Works

Lettres inédites à Gabriel Cramer, GeorgesLe Roy (ed.), Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1953. Forimportant revisions to Le Roy’s dating of Condillac’sletters, see Petacco 1971.
Les Monades, Bongie, Laurence (ed.), inStudies onVoltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 187, 1980.
Oeuvres philosophiques, Georges Le Roy (ed.), 3 volumes,Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–1951.
- Volume I (1947) contains theEssai sur l’origine desconnoissances humaines, Traité des Systêmes,Traité des Sensations, “Dissertation sur laliberté,” “Réponse a un reproche quim’a été fait sur le project exécutédans le Traité des Sensations,” “Extraitraisonné du traité des sensations,”Traité des Animaux, “Lettre de monsieurl’abbé de Condillac à l’auteur des‘Lettres à un Américan,’”“Discours de réception a l’académieFrançoise,” and selections from theCoursd’études pour l’instruction du Prince deParme, including the introduction to the course of studies,Grammaire, De l’art d’écrire, De l’art deraisonner, andDe l’art de Penser, It is prefacedby Le Roy’s introduction, surveying Condillac’s life, thedevelopment of his thought, and his influence.
- Volume II (1948) contains excerpts from the treatment of ancientand modern history in theCours d’études, Le Commerceet le Gouvernement, La Logique, La Langue des Calculs, andcorrespondence.
- Volume III (1951) contains theDictionnaire des synonymesand a bibliography containing directions regarding Condillacmanuscripts and correspondence.
Condillac, Lefèvre, Roger, Vienne: Segliers, 1966.This contains substantial selections from Condillac’s worksinterpersed with running commentary. It is an excellent introductionto his thought.
Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Hans Aarsleff(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
La Logique/Logic, W. R. Albury (ed. and trans.), NewYork: Abaris, 1980. This is a bilingual edition with Englishtranslation and a facsimilie reproduction of an early French editionon facing pages. Unfortunately, the editor neglects to indicate whichedition is being reproduced.
Condillac’s treatise on the sensations, GeraldineCarr (trans.), London: Favil Press, 1930.
An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge: being a supplementto Mr. Locke’s essay on the human understanding, ThomasNugent (trans.), London: J. Nourse, 1756. Reprinted in facsimilie,1971, Gainsville: Scholar’s Facsimilies and Reprints.
Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot, Abbé deCondillac, 2 volumes, Franklin Philip (trans.), Hillsdale NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982–87.
- Volume I (1982) containsA Treatise on Systems, A Treatise onSensations, andLogic, or the First Developments of the Artof Thinking. The translation of Condillac’s introduction totheTreatise on Sensations, contains a translation of the“Extrait rasonné,” without acknowledgement orseparation from the rest of Condillac’s original introduction.The translation of theTreatise on Sensations, omits the“Dissertation on Liberty.”
- Volume II (1987) contains a judicious abridgment of theEssayon the Origin of Human Knowledge, and the introduction to theCourse of Study for the Prince of Parma,
Commerce and Government Considered in Their MutualRelationship, Shelagh Eltis (trans.), with an introduction byShelagh Eltis and Walter Eltis, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.

Related Primary Source Material

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de,Histoire naturelle,générale et particulière, Paris: ImprimerieRoyale, 1749–53.
Bonnet, Charles, 1755,Essai de psychologie, Hildesheim:Olms, 1978.
Chesselden, W., 1728, “An Account of some Observations madeby a young Gentleman who was born blind ... and was couch’dbetween 13 and 14 Years of Age,” London: W. Innys, 1729;reprinted in Royal Society of London,PhilosophicalTransactions, 35 (402): 447–450.
Diderot, Denis, 1749, “Letter on the Blind for the Use ofThose Who See,” inDiderot’s Early PhilosophicalWorks, Margaret Jourdain (trans.), New York: Burt Franklin,1972.
Helvetius, Claude A., 1760,De L’esprit, or, Essays onthe mind and its several faculties, New York: Burt Franklin,1970.
Hume, David, 1739,A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I,David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000.
Lignac, Joseph Adrien Lelarge, Abbé de [Réaumur,René Antoine Ferchault de], 1756,Suite des “Lettresà un Américan” sur les IV et V Volumes de l’“Histoire Naturelle” de M. de Buffon, et sur le“Traité des Animaux” de M. l’abbé deCondillac, 4 vols., Hambourg. (Cited by Le Roy in Condillac,Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. I: 381 n.19.)
Reid, Thomas, 1764,An Inquiry into the Human Mind on thePrinciples of Common Sense, Derek R. Brookes (ed.), UniversityPark: The Pennsylvania State University, 1997.
Tetens, Johan Nicolai, 1777,Philosophische Versuche überdie menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung, Wilhelm Uebele (ed.),Berlin: Reuther & Richard, 1913.

Secondary Literature

Aarsleff, Hans, 1975, “Condillac’s SpeechlessStatue,”Akten des II. InternationalenLeibniz-Kongresses (Volume 4), Wiesbaden: 287–302.
Aarsleff, Hans, 1982,From Locke to Saussure: Essays on theStudy of Language and Intellectual History, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota.
Aarsleff, Hans, 2006, “Philosophy of Language,” inKnud Haakonssen (ed.),The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-CenturyPhilosophy, Volume 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Albury, W. R., 1986, “The order of Ideas,” in John A.Shuster (ed.),The Politics and Rhetoric of ScientificMethod, Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Baertschi, Bernard, 1984, “La statue de Condillac, image dureel ou fiction logique?”Revue Philosophique deLouvain, 82: 335–364.
Baguenault de Puchesse, Gustave, 1910,Condillac: sa vie, saphilosophie, son influence, Paris: Plon-Nourrit.
Beal, M. W., 1973, “Condillac as Precursor of Kant,”Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 102:193–229.
Bertrand, Aliènor (ed.), 2002,Condillac:L’origine de langage, Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance.
Bertrand, Aliènor (ed.), 2002,Le vocabulaire deCondillac, Paris: Ellipses.
Bongie, Laurence L., 1978, “A new Condillac Letter and theGenesis of theTraité des sensations,”Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16: 83–94.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1951,The Philosophy of theEnlightenment, C.A. Koellin and James P. Pettegrove (trans.),Boston: Beacon.
Charrak, André, 2003,Empirisme et métaphysique:L’Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines deCondillac, Paris: J. Vrin.
Dagognet, François, 2004,L’animal selonCondillac: Étude sur le Traité des animaux, Paris:J. Vrin.
Derrida, Jacques, 1987,The Archaeology of the Frivolous,John P. Leavy (trans.), Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
Duchesneau, François, 1974, “Condillac critique deLocke,”Studi Internationali di Filosofia, 6:77–98.
Falkenstein, Lorne, 2005, “Condillac’s Paradox,”Journal of the History of Philosophy, 43: 403–435.
Funke, Gerhard, 1957, “Natur und zweite Natur imkonsequenten Sensualismus. Condillacs Transformationstheorie,”Philosophia Narturalis, 4: 101–125.
George, Rolf A., 1991, “The Tradition of ThoughtExperiments,” in Tamara Horowitz (ed.),Epistemology inThought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, Lanham: Rowman& Littlefield.
Gilot, Michel and Sgard, Jean, 1981, “Biographie,” inJean Sgard, ed.,Corpus Condillac, Geneva: Slatkine.
Grandi, Giovanni B., 2008, “Reid and Condillac on Sensationand Perception: A Thought Experiment on Sensory Deprivation,”Southwest Philosophy Review, 24: 191–200.
Hasnaoui, C., 1977, “Condillac, chemins dusensualisme,” in M. Duchet and M. Jalley (eds.),Langues etlangages de Leibniz à l’ encyclopédie, Paris:U.G.E.
Heidsieck, François, 1985, “La métaphysique deCondillac,”Archives de Philosophie, 48:643–652.
Hine McNiven, Ellen, 1979,A Critical Study ofCondillac’s Traité des Systems, The Hague: M.Nijhoff.
Jacquette, Dale, 2015, “Condillac’s AnalyticDilemma,”History of Philosophy Quarterly, 32:141–160.
Joly, Andre, 1985, “Cartesian or CondillacianLinguistics?”Topoi, 4: 145–49.
Knight, Isabel F., 1968, “Bibliographical Essay,” inIsabel Knight,The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillacand the French Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale.
Knight, Isabel F., 1968,The Geometric Spirit: The Abbéde Condillac and the French Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale.Though dated, this work remains unsurpassed as the authorativetreatment of Condillac’s thought in English.
Kourim. Z., 1974. “Le discours de la méthode deCondillac,”Revue de métaphysique et de morale,79: 177–195.
Kreimendahl, Lothar, 1982, “Condillac und die Monaden. Zueinem neuaufgefundenen Text des Abbés,”Archivfür Geschichte der Philosophie, 64: 280–288.
Kreimendahl, Lothar, 1984, “Bibliographie des Schrifttums zuCondillac (1840–1980),”Zeitschrift fürphilosophische Forchung, 38: 311–321.
Kreimendahl, Lothar, 1994,Hauptwerke der Philosophie.Rationalismus und Empirismus, Stuttgart: Reclam.
Krüger, Lorenz, 1973, “Empirismus und Sensualismus: einExkurs über Condillac,” in Lorenz Krüger (ed.),Der Begriff des Empirismus. Erkenntnistheoretische Studien amBeispiel John Lockes, Berlin: De Gruyter.
Koana, Akiko, 1985, “La theorie musicale dansl’epistemologie de Condillac,” in Peter McCormick (ed.),The Reasons of Art, Ottawa: University of Ottawa.
Lenoir, Raymond, 1924,Condillac, Paris: F. Alcan.
LeRoy, Georges, 1937,La psychologie de Condillac, Paris:Boivin.
Malherbe, Michel, 2004, “Introduction” to Condillac,Traité des animaux, Paris: J. Vrin.
McRae, Robert, 1961,The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences:Bacon to Kant, Toronto: University of Toronto.
Morgan, Michael J., 1977,Molyneux’s Question. Vision,Touch and the Philosophy of Perception, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
O’Neal, John C, 1996,The Authority of Experience:Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment, University Park:The Pennsylvania State University.
Oppenheimer, Angelika, 2006, “Introduction”, AngelikaOppenheimer (trans.),Versuch über den Ursprung dermenschlichen Erkenntnis, Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann.
Paganini, Gianni, 1992, “Psychologie et physiologie del’entendement chez Condillac,”Dix-huitiemesiecle, 24: 165–178.
Paganini, Gianni, 1988, “Signes, imagination etmémoire: De la psychologie de Wolff à l’Essai deCondillac”Revue des Sciences Philosophiques etTheologiques, 72: 287–300.
Paradis, André, 1993, “De Condillac a Pinel ou lesfondements philosophiques du traitement moral,”Philosophiques, 20: 69–112.
Pastore, Nicholas, 1971,Selective History of Theories ofVisual Perception: 1650–1950, New York: Oxford.
Pécharman, Martine, 1999, “Signification et langagedans l’Essai de Condillac,”Revue demétaphysique et de morale, (1): 81–103.
Petacco, Piero, 1971, “Note sul carteggioCondillac–Cramer,”Belfagor, 26:83–95.
Robert, Thomas, 2012, “Les deux langages d’actioncondillaciens: corps, langage, connaissances,”Rivistaitaliana di filosofia del linguaggio, 5: 150–162.
Roberts, Lissa, 1992, “Condillac, Lavoiser, and theInstrumentalization of Science,”Kennis Methode, 16:172–190.
Rousseau, Nicholas, 1986,Connaissance et langage chezCondillac, Geneva: Droz.
Sgard, Jean (ed.), 1981,Corpus Condillac, Geneva:Slatkine.
Sgard, Jean (ed.), 1982,Condillac et les problèmes dulangage, Geneva: Slatkine.
Wells, G.A., 1987,The Origin of Language: Aspects of theDiscussion from Condillac to Wundt, Chicago: Open Court.
Wojciechowska, Wanda, “Le sensualisme de Condillac,”Revue philosophique de la France et del’étranger, 158: 297–320.

Academic Tools

How to cite this entry.
Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

c18: International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.

Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative.
The Encyclopedia Now Needs Your Support
Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia Free

Browse

About

Support SEP

Mirror Sites

View this site from another server:

USA (Main Site)Philosophy, Stanford University

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Movatterモバイル変換