CONDILLAC.
The French took up the problem of carrying out the empiricism of Locke,
to its ultimate consequences in sensualism and materialism. Although
this empiricism had sprung up on English soil, and had soon become
universally prevalent there, it was reserved for France to push it to
the last extreme, and show that it overthrew all the foundations of
moral and religious life. This final consequence of empiricism did not
correspond to the English national character. But on the contrary, both
the empiricism of Locke, and the scepticism of Hume, found themselves
opposed in the latter half of the eighteenth century, by a reaction in
the Scotch philosophy (_Reid_ 1701-1799, _Beattie_, _Oswald_, _Dugald
Stewart_, 1753-1828). The attempt was here made to establish certain
principles of truth as innate and immanent in the subject, which should
avail both against the _tabula rasa_ of Locke, and the scepticism of
Hume. These principles were taken in a thoroughly English way, as those
of common sense, as facts of experience, as facts of the moral instinct
and sound human understanding; as something empirically given, and found
in the common consciousness by self-contemplation and reflection. But in
France, on the other hand, there was such a public and social condition
of things during the eighteenth century, that we can only regard the
systems of materialism and egoistic moralism which here appeared, as the
last practical consequences of the empirical standpoint,—to be the
natural result of the universal desolation. The expression of a lady
respecting the system of Helvetius is well known, that it uttered only
the secret of all the world.
Most closely connected with the empiricism of Locke, is the sensualism
of the Abbé _Condillac_. Condillac was born at Grenoble, 1715. In his
first writings he adhered to Locke, but subsequently passed beyond him,
and sought to ground a philosophical standpoint of his own. He was
elected a member of the French Academy in 1768, and died in 1780. His
writings fill twenty-three volumes, and have their origin in a moral and
religious interest.
Condillac, like Locke, started with the proposition that all our
knowledge comes from experience. While, however, Locke had indicated two
sources for this knowledge, sensation and reflection, the outer and the
inner sense, Condillac referred reflection to sensation, and reduced the
two sources to one. Reflection is, with him, only sensation; all
intellectual occurrences, even the combination of ideas and volition,
are to be regarded only as modified sensations. It is the chief problem
and content of Condillac’s philosophizing to carry out this thought, and
derive the different functions of the soul out of the sensations of the
outer sense. He illustrates this thought by a statue, which has been
made with a perfect internal organization like a man, but which
possesses no ideas, and in which only gradually one sense after another
awakens and fills the soul with impressions. In such a view man stands
on the same footing as the brute, for all his knowledge and all his
incentives to action he receives from sensation. Condillac consequently
names men perfect animals, and brutes imperfect men. Still he revolts
from affirming the materiality of the soul, and denying the existence of
God. These ultimate consequences of sensualism were first drawn by
others after him, as would naturally enough follow. As sensualism
affirmed that truth or being could only be perceived through the sense,
so we have only to reverse this proposition, and have the thesis of
materialism, viz.: the sensible alone is, there is no other being but
material being.