CONDILLAC

condillac, etienne bonnot de (1715-1780), french philosopher, was born at grenoble of a legal family on the 30th of september 1715, and, like his elder brother, the well-known political writer, abbe de mably, took holy orders and became abbe de mureau.[1] in both cases the profession was hardly more than nominal, and condillac's whole life, with the exception of an interval as tutor at the court of parma, was devoted to speculation. his works are _essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines_ (1746), _traite des systemes_ (1749), _traite des sensations_ (1754), _traite des animaux_ (1755), a comprehensive _cours d'etudes_ (1767-1773) in 13 vols., written for the young duke ferdinand of parma, a grandson of louis xv., _le commerce et le gouvernement, consideres relativement l'un a l'autre_ (1776), and two posthumous works, _logique_ (1781) and the unfinished _langue des calculs_ (1798). in his earlier days in paris he came much into contact with the circle of diderot. a friendship with rousseau, which lasted in some measure to the end, may have been due in the first instance to the fact that rousseau had been domestic tutor in the family of condillac's uncle, m. de mably, at lyons. thanks to his natural caution and reserve, condillac's relations with unorthodox philosophers did not injure his career; and he justified abundantly the choice of the french court in sending him to parma to educate the orphan duke, then a child of seven years. in 1768, on his return from italy, he was elected to the french academy, but attended no meeting after his reception. he spent his later years in retirement at flux, a small property which he had purchased near beaugency, and died there on the 3rd of august 1780. though condillac's genius was not of the highest order, he is important both as a psychologist and as having established systematically in france the principles of locke, whom voltaire had lately made fashionable. in setting forth his empirical sensationism, condillac shows many of the best qualities of his age and nation, lucidity, brevity, moderation and an earnest striving after logical method. unfortunately it must be said of him as of so many of his contemporaries, "er hat die theile in seiner hand, fehlt leider nur der geistiger band"; in the analysis of the human mind on which his fame chiefly rests, he has missed out the active and spiritual side of human experience. his first book, the _essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines_, keeps close to his english master. he accepts with some indecision locke's deduction of our knowledge from two sources, sensation and reflection, and uses as his main principle of explanation the association of ideas. his next book, the _traite des systemes_, is a vigorous criticism of those modern systems which are based upon abstract principles or upon unsound hypotheses. his polemic, which is inspired throughout with the spirit of locke, is directed against the innate ideas of the cartesians, malebranche's faculty--psychology, leibnitz's monadism and preestablished harmony, and, above all, against the conception of substance set forth in the first part of the _ethics_ of spinoza. by far the most important of his works is the _traite des sensations_, in which he emancipates himself from the tutelage of locke and treats psychology in his own characteristic way. he had been led, he tells us, partly by the criticism of a talented lady, mademoiselle ferrand, to question locke's doctrine that the senses give us intuitive knowledge of objects, that the eye, for example, judges naturally of shapes, sizes, positions and distances. his discussions with the lady had convinced him that to clear up such questions it was necessary to study our senses separately, to distinguish precisely what ideas we owe to each sense, to observe how the senses are trained, and how one sense aids another. the result, he was confident, would show that all human faculty and knowledge are transformed sensation only, to the exclusion of any other principle, such as reflection. the plan of the book is that the author imagines a statue organized inwardly like a man, animated by a soul which has never received an idea, into which no sense-impression has ever penetrated. he then unlocks its senses one by one, beginning with smell, as the sense that contributes least to human knowledge. at its first experience of smell, the consciousness of the statue is entirely occupied by it; and this occupancy of consciousness is attention. the statue's smell-experience will produce pleasure or pain; and pleasure and pain will thenceforward be the master-principle which, determining all the operations of its mind, will raise it by degrees to all the knowledge of which it is capable. the next stage is memory, which is the lingering impression of the smell-experience upon the attention: "memory is nothing more than a mode of feeling." from memory springs comparison: the statue experiences the smell, say, of a rose, while remembering that of a carnation; and "comparison is nothing more than giving one's attention to two things simultaneously." and "as soon as the statue has comparison it has judgment." comparisons and judgments become habitual, are stored in the mind and formed into series, and thus arises the powerful principle of the association of ideas. from comparison of past and present experiences in respect of their pleasure-giving quality arises desire; it is desire that determines the operation of our faculties, stimulates the memory and imagination, and gives rise to the passions. the passions, also, are nothing but sensation transformed. these indications will suffice to show the general course of the argument in the first section of the _traite des sensations_. to show the thoroughness of the treatment it will be enough to quote the headings of the chief remaining chapters: "of the ideas of a man limited to the sense of smell," "of a man limited to the sense of hearing," "of smell and hearing combined," "of taste by itself, and of taste combined with smell and hearing," "of a man limited to the sense of sight." in the second section of the treatise condillac invests his statue with the sense of touch, which first informs it of the existence of external objects. in a very careful and elaborate analysis, he distinguishes the various elements in our tactile experiences--the touching of one's own body, the touching of objects other than one's own body, the experience of movement, the exploration of surfaces by the hands: he traces the growth of the statue's perceptions of extension, distance and shape. the third section deals with the combination of touch with the other senses. the fourth section deals with the desires, activities and ideas of an isolated man who enjoys possession of all the senses; and ends with observations on a "wild boy" who was found living among bears in the forests of lithuania. the conclusion of the whole work is that in the natural order of things everything has its source in sensation, and yet that this source is not equally abundant in all men; men differ greatly in the degree of vividness with which they feel; and, finally, that man is nothing but what he has acquired; all innate faculties and ideas are to be swept away. the last dictum suggests the difference that has been made to this manner of psychologizing by modern theories of evolution and heredity. condillac's work on politics and history, contained, for the most part, in his _cours d'etudes_, offers few features of interest, except so far as it illustrates his close affinity to english thought: he had not the warmth and imagination to make a good historian. in logic, on which he wrote extensively, he is far less successful than in psychology. he enlarges with much iteration, but with few concrete examples, upon the supremacy of the analytic method; argues that reasoning consists in the substitution of one proposition for another which is identical with it; and lays it down that science is the same thing as a well-constructed language, a proposition which in his _langue des calculs_ he tries to prove by the example of arithmetic. his logic has in fact the good and bad points that we might expect to find in a sensationist who knows no science but mathematics. he rejects the medieval apparatus of the syllogism; but is precluded by his standpoint from understanding the active, spiritual character of thought; nor had he that interest in natural science and appreciation of inductive reasoning which form the chief merit of j. s. mill. it is obvious enough that condillac's anti-spiritual psychology, with its explanation of personality as an aggregate of sensations, leads straight to atheism and determinism. there is, however, no reason to question the sincerity with which he repudiates both these consequences. what he says upon religion is always in harmony with his profession; and he vindicated the freedom of the will in a dissertation that has very little in common with the _traite des sensations_ to which it is appended. the common reproach of materialism should certainly not be made against him. he always asserts the substantive reality of the soul; and in the opening words of his _essai_, "whether we rise to heaven, or descend to the abyss, we never get outside ourselves--it is always our own thoughts that we perceive," we have the subjectivist principle that forms the starting-point of berkeley. as was fitting to a disciple of locke, condillac's ideas have had most importance in their effect upon english thought. in matters connected with the association of ideas, the supremacy of pleasure and pain, and the general explanation of all mental contents as sensations or transformed sensations, his influence can be traced upon the mills and upon bain and herbert spencer. and, apart from any definite propositions, condillac did a notable work in the direction of making psychology a science; it is a great step from the desultory, genial observation of locke to the rigorous analysis of condillac, short-sighted and defective as that analysis may seem to us in the light of fuller knowledge. his method, however, of imaginative reconstruction was by no means suited to english ways of thinking. in spite of his protests against abstraction, hypothesis and synthesis, his allegory of the statue is in the highest degree abstract, hypothetical and synthetic. james mill, who stood more by the study of concrete realities, put condillac into the hands of his youthful son with the warning that here was an example of what to avoid in the method of psychology. in france condillac's doctrine, so congenial to the tone of 18th century philosophism, reigned in the schools for over fifty years, challenged only by a few who, like maine de biran, saw that it gave no sufficient account of volitional experience. early in the 19th century, the romantic awakening of germany had spread to france, and sensationism was displaced by the eclectic spiritualism of victor cousin. condillac's collected works were published in 1798 (23 vols.) and two or three times subsequently; the last edition (1822) has an introductory dissertation by a. f. thery. the _encyclopedie methodique_ has a very long article on condillac (naigeon). biographical details and criticism of the _traite des systemes_ in j. p. damiron's _memoires pour servir a l'histoire de la philosophie au dixhuitieme siecle_, tome iii.; a full criticism in v. cousin's _cours de l'histoire de la philosophie moderne_, ser. i. tome iii. consult also f. rethore, _condillac ou l'empirisme et le rationalisme_ (1864); l. dewaule, _condillac et la psychologie anglaise contemporaine_ (1891); histories of philosophy. (h. st.) footnote: [1] i.e. abbot _in commendam_ of the premonstratensian abbey of mureau in the vosges. (ed.) condition (lat. _condicio_, from _condicere_, to agree upon, arrange; not connected with _conditio_, from _condere, conditum_, to put together), a stipulation, agreement. the term is applied technically to any circumstance, action or event which is regarded as the indispensable prerequisite of some other circumstance, action or event. it is also applied generally to the sum of the circumstances in which a person is situated, and more specifically to favourable or prosperous circumstances; thus a person of wealth or birth is described as a person "of condition," or an athlete as being "in condition," i.e. physically fit, having gone through the necessary course of preliminary training. in all these senses there is implicit the idea of limitation or restraint imposed with a view to the attainment of a particular end. (1) _in logic_, the term "condition" is closely related to "cause" in so far as it is applied to prior events, &c., in the absence of which another event would not take place. it is, however, different from "cause" inasmuch as it has a predominantly negative or passive significance. hence the adjective "conditional" is applied to propositions in which the truth of the main statement is made to depend on the truth of another; these propositions are distinguished from categorical propositions, which simply state a fact, as being "composed of two categorical propositions united by a conjunction," e.g. if a is b, c is d. the second statement (the "consequent") is restricted or qualified by the first (the "antecedent"). by some logicians these propositions are classified as (1) hypothetical, and (2) disjunctive, and their function in syllogistic reasoning gives rise to the following classification of conditional arguments:--(a) constructive hypothetical syllogism (_modus ponens_, "affirmative mood"): if a is b, c is d; but a is b; therefore c is d. (b) destructive hypothetical syllogism (_modus tollens_, mood which "removes," i.e. the consequent): if a is b, c is d; but c is not d; therefore a is not b. in (a) the antecedent must be affirmed, in (b) the consequent must be denied; otherwise the arguments become fallacious. a second class of conditional arguments are disjunctive syllogisms consisting of (c) the _modus ponendo tollens_: a is either b or c; but a is b; therefore c is not d; and (d) _modus tollendo ponens_: a is either b or c; a is not b; therefore a is c. a more complicated conditional argument is the dilemma (q.v.).[1] the limiting or restrictive significance of "condition" has led to its use in metaphysical theory in contradistinction to the conception of absolute being, the _aseitas_ of the schoolmen. thus all finite things exist in certain relations not only to all other things but also to thought; in other words, all finite existence is "conditioned." hence sir wm. hamilton speaks of the "philosophy of the unconditioned," i.e. of thought in distinction to things which are determined by thought in relation to other things. an analogous distinction is made (cf. h. w. b. joseph, _introduction to logic_, pp. 380 foll.) between the so-called universal laws of nature and conditional principles, which, though they are regarded as having the force of law, are yet dependent or derivative, i.e. cannot be treated as universal truths. such principles hold good under present conditions, but other conditions might be imagined under which they would be invalid; they hold good only as corollaries from the laws of nature under existing conditions. (2) _in law_, condition in its general sense is a restraint annexed to a thing, so that by the non-performance the party to it shall receive prejudice and loss, and by the performance commodity or advantage. conditions may be either: (1) condition in a deed or _express_ condition, i.e. the condition being expressed in actual words; or (2) condition in law or _implied_ condition, i.e. where, although no condition is actually expressed, the law implies a condition. the word is also used indifferently to mean either the event upon the happening of which some estate or obligation is to begin or end, or the provision or stipulation that the estate or obligation will depend upon the happening of the event. a condition may be of several kinds: (1) a condition _precedent_, where, for example, an estate is granted to one for life upon condition that, if the grantee pay the grantor a certain sum on such a day, he shall have the fee simple; (2) a condition _subsequent_, where, for example, an estate is granted in fee upon condition that the grantee shall pay a certain sum on a certain day, or that his estate shall cease. thus a condition precedent gets or gains, while a condition subsequent keeps and continues. a condition may also be _affirmative_, that is, the doing of an act; _negative_, the not doing of an act; _restrictive, compulsory_, &c. the word is also used adjectivally in the sense set out above, as in the phrases "conditional legacy," "conditional limitation," "conditional promise," &c.; that is, the legacy, the limitation, the promise is to take effect only upon the happening of a certain event. footnote: [1] the terminology used above has not been adopted by all logicians. "conditional" has been used as equivalent to "hypothetical" in the widest sense (including "disjunctive"); or narrowed down to be synonymous with "conjunctive" (the condition being there more explicit), as a subdivision of "hypothetical."