## 1. Life and Works



Condillac was born on September 30, 1714 in Grenoble as the third son
of Gabriel Bonnot, Vicomte de Mably, and Catherine de La Coste.
("Condillac" was the name of an estate purchased by his
father in 1720.) He is said to have had very poor eyesight and a weak
physical constitution, factors that so retarded his intellectual
development that as late as his twelfth year he was still unable to
read. His education began only in his teens, first under the direction
of a local priest, then at Lyons, where he went to live with his older
brother, Jean, after the death of their father. Perhaps because of his
reticence and his late learning his family regarded him as possessing
limited intellectual abilities. He nonetheless managed to continue his
education as a seminarian in Paris, at Saint-Suplice and at the
Sorbonne. He took holy orders in 1740 and wore a cassock for the rest
of his life, but did no pastoral work. After some years spent living
the life of a man of letters in Paris, during which he came to be
closely acquainted with Rousseau and Diderot, and published work that
won him election to the Prussian Academy of the Sciences (1749), he
accepted a position as tutor to the Prince of Parma, a post that he
held from 1758-68. He returned to Paris in 1768 and was elected
to the French Academy in that year, but he left the city shortly
after, in 1773, and took up residence on a country estate he had
purchased near Beaugency. He died there on August 3, 1780. 



Condillac published two main philosophical works: the *Essay on the
Origin of Human Knowledge* of 1746, and the *Treatise on
Sensations* of 1754, both of which were devoted to expositing his
views on the role of experience in the development of our cognitive
capacities.



The earlier *Essay* was a less radical work. Though it sought
to explain how the cognitive faculties are developed as a consequence
of sensation, it took sensation itself largely for granted. Condillac
explicitly rejected the views that the mind can make judgments that it
is not aware of, and that we can confuse the products of inferential
operations with immediately given sensations. As a consequence, he
maintained, in opposition to Molyneux, Locke, and Berkeley, that we do
not need to learn to perceive visual depth. However, the
*Essay* was also more wide-ranging than the *Treatise*.
It devoted attention to the development of language and its role both
in the acquisition of our more sophisticated cognitive powers and in
the generation of false philosophies. These are topics that Condillac
later relegated to his works on logic.



In the *Treatise* Condillac focused just on our pre-linguistic
cognitive abilities, which he came to think he might have
underestimated when he wrote the *Essay*. He retracted his
earlier claim that perception is a transparent process and accepted
both that it involves unconscious inference from what is given in
sensation and that sensation itself may contain more than it is at
first perceived to contain. He also retracted his earlier claim that
depth is immediately perceived by vision. To support these revised
opinions, he proposed a famous thought experiment. He asked his
readers to consider an originally inanimate and insentient human being
(Condillac spoke of a being that is just a "statue" of a
human being) and to consider what this being could come to know were
it to acquire each of the senses in isolation from the others, or each
in combination with just one or two others. In proposing this question
Condillac was asking a more radical version of the question Molyneux
had posed to Locke: would a person born blind and made to see perceive
spatial features well enough upon first sight to be able to identify
cubes and spheres without touching them? Condillac was asking what a
person endowed with just a sense of smell would think upon acquiring
the power of hearing, or what a person endowed with vision would know
if unaffected by hunger, incapable of motion, and unaware of any
tactile sensation. His answer to these questions sought not just to
explain how this person would acquire ideas of space and of external
objects, but to prove that nothing more would be needed for it to
acquire all the knowledge and all of the abilities that we have other
than just to experience a sufficiently rich array of sensations.



Condillac's other philosophical works support and embellish the
doctrines of the *Essay* and the *Treatise*. They are
the *Treatise on Systems* of 1749, which is devoted to
critiquing the metaphysics and the methodology of earlier
philosophers, the *Treatise on Animals* of 1755, which attempts
to explain how human souls differ from those of animals with respect
to intelligence and free will, the "Dissertation on
Liberty", an important short work appended to the *Treatise
on Sensations* that further addresses the issue of human free
will, the "Summary *[extrait raisonne]* of the
*Treatise on Sensations*," originally included in the
*Treatise on Animals,* and a textbook on Logic (1780). He also
published a work on commerce and government, assembled a dictionary of
synonyms, and put together a multi-volume course of studies that he
had developed while tutoring the Prince of Parma. The latter dealt
principally with history but also included some philosophical
material, including a different presentation of logic. At the time of
his death he left an incomplete a work entitled *The Language of
Calculation.*


## 2. The Metaphysics of Condillac's Sensationism



Condillac's account of the development of our cognitive
capacities was informed by a particular conception of the nature of
the mind and the sensations it is originally given. He argued that the
mind must be an unextended or immaterial substance (*Essay*
I.i.1
 SS6).[1]
 When it senses, nothing actually passes into it from the outside
world or the body. Instead the action of external objects on the sense
organs brings about changes in the body and these changes serve as the
merely occasional cause of the production of sensations in the mind.




Sensations are modifications of our being. To understand them as
images 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 it
exceeds the capacities of animals. However, unlike Reid, who was later
to argue for a rigorous distinction between sensations, considered as
states of feeling experienced by the mind, and perceptions, considered
as acts of thinking something about an object, Condillac maintained
that sensations do lend themselves to being treated as ideas. He
denied that sensations are "something that only occurs aside
from thoughts and modifies them" and insisted that they are
"as representative" as any other thought experienced by
the mind (*Essay* I.ii.2 SS9).


## 3. Sensation in the *Essay*



Most early modern philosophers were impressed by the facts of
geometrical optics, which teach that light imprints an inverted,
left-right reversed image of the external world on the concave surface
of the back of the eye. If we accept that the eye is the means of
visual perception, then this teaching appears to imply that the eyes
filter out information about the distance at which objects are set
outwards from us and transmit just information about position along
the horizon and the azimuth to the mind. After all, while points at
different angles of inclination upwards or downwards from the horizon,
or at different compass directions will project light to different
parts of the retina, points that differ only with reference to their
distance outwards from the eye will project light onto the same part
of the eye. But if differences in distance outwards make no difference
to the impression on the eye, and the mind is only affected as a
consequence of how the eye is affected, then information about outward
distances is not conveyed to the mind. It would seem, therefore, that
visual perception must originally lack information about distance
outwards. It must consist of an awareness of images that are only
two-dimensional projections of solid objects in a three dimensional
space. 



But the Condillac of the *Essay* was not impressed by these
considerations. Though he admitted that the image imprinted by light
on the eye is merely two-dimensional, he denied that the mind must
therefore only be aware of a two-dimensional image (*Essay*
I.vi SS2). However he had little to say about how the mind might
acquire information about outward distances, and instead confined
himself 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 two
dimensional projection of that object, variously shaded in its
different parts, and then judge that this two-dimensional, variously
coloured image is a representation of a uniformly coloured
three-dimensional object (the classic presentation of this view is to
be found in Locke's *Essay*, book II, chapter ix,
paragraph 8). But I am not conscious of seeing a flat, variously
coloured circle, nor am I conscious of making a judgment about what
this image represents. Instead, I seem to immediately see a uniformly
coloured, three-dimensional object. Moreover, try as I might, I cannot
make myself aware of drawing an inference. And I have so little
awareness of the flat, variously coloured circle that I supposedly see
that, without the aid of instruction in drawing or painting, I would
have no idea that it bears any relation to a uniformly coloured globe.
Condillac found this insupportable. The mind, he maintained, cannot be
so deeply ignorant of what it senses or of what it does
(*Essay* I.vi SSSS3-5).



Consistently with the view that we do not need to learn to perceive
depth, Condillac maintained that we do not need to learn to perceive
separation in any other spatial dimension. Consequently, a previously
blind person, made to see for the first time, should see colours to be
extended over all three dimensions. The alternative, in
Condillac's view is that the newly sighted person would
experience just a "mathematical point" of colour, and he
rejected this as patently absurd (*Essay* I.vi.
SSSS12-14).



Condillac was aware that these claims had been challenged by such
empirical studies of recovered vision as were available at the time.
In 1728, the English surgeon, William Chesselden, had reported to the
British Royal Society that subjects recovering from operations to
remove cataracts that had blinded them since birth appeared to need to
learn to associate what they saw with tactile experience before they
could recognize shapes or objects. Condillac replied to this contrary
evidence by claiming that it would take some time for newly sighted
subjects to learn how to focus the eyes in order to perceive colours
distinctly, and so to see their outlines. It would then take time for
the subjects to attend to the shapes that distinctly seen colours
exhibit, since we can expect that at first they would be overwhelmed
and confused by the variety of information presented by the eyes, much
like a person gaining a first glimpse of a Bosch painting. Finally,
even after they came to see colours as, say, outlining square or round
shapes, they might still hesitate to assume that simply because an
object looks to have a certain shape, that therefore it must be felt
to have that shape as well. For all of these reasons, time might pass
and the subject might appear to be learning to associate visual
experiences with tangible objects, even though the colours that are
originally seen are already extended and shaped in three dimensions
(*Essay* I.vi. SS16).


## 4. Sensation in the *Treatise*



Condillac's reply to the Chesselden data contained the germs of
an insight that was to be central for the later *Treatise*: the
claim that visual sensations, and indeed all sensations, might contain
information that goes unnoticed by a subject simply because it is not
attended to. This insight, already present in the *Essay*, was
subversive. It challenged that work's rejection of perception by
means of unconscious sensations and unconscious inferences. It led to
the *Treatise*'s claim that having a sensation does not
imply being conscious of everything that sensation involves
(*Treatise* I.xi.8, III.iii.6). 



In his *Logic*, Condillac illustrated this point by asking his
readers to imagine a group of people who travel by night to a chateau
situated on a high point before a vast panorama of fields, mountains,
cities, towns, and forests. At dawn, the windows are thrown open for
just an instant. In that instant, each member of the company
experiences a compound visual sensation consisting of multiple,
simultaneously present colour patches disposed in space so as to
depict all the parts of the panorama that lies out in a particular
direction. But from the view obtained in just an instant, no one can
say what it was that they saw. If the shutters are left open for more
than an instant nothing new is presented to the company. That is, they
do not have any sensation they did not have in the first instant. They
come to perceive what it is they at first already sensed by
selectively attending to each of its parts in turn and then noting how
these parts are related to one another (*Logic,* Part I,
Chapter ii).



Condillac had always appreciated that this act of attention is not an
innate operation, any more than such higher cognitive operations as
abstraction, judgment, or reasoning are innate operations. We need to
learn how to attend to what we sense. Experience itself serves as our
teacher. The operation of attention is invoked by our needs and
interests. We attend first to what promises to satisfy our needs and
interests, which are always with us and which always direct our
thought. Our knowledge of what promises to satisfy our needs and
interests is a product of past experience, which has made us aware of
what objects are connected with the frustration or satisfaction of
those needs and interests. The needs and interests themselves are
developed 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 the *Essay* Condillac
had not appreciated the full implications of this view. Recognizing
those implications required being more careful about specifying what
is originally given in sensation, what is originally attended to, and
what leads us to attend to anything else. The device of the slowly
animated "statue" was invoked to assist in making these
determinations.



Condillac supposed that the most primitive form of experience would be
the sense of smell. A being (Condillac's "statue")
endowed with just this one sense but no motive power would, Condillac
supposed, be capable of receiving pleasure or pain from the experience
of different odoriferous objects. However, all that the being could do
to avoid painful or acquire pleasurable sensations would be to try to
distract itself with remembered or imagined smells when occurrent ones
proved 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 this
effect to be a rose smell sensation that somehow stands before the
mind as an object of contemplation. Others might consider the effect
to be an act that has the scent of a rose as its intentional object,
or an act of feeling a certain way ("rose-scentedly"). But
Condillac maintained that the being itself would not at first have any
conception of objects distinct from itself or even any conception of
itself, let alone any views on the metaphysical status of its sensory
states. When it smells a rose, it experiences itself as simply being
the smell of a rose (*Treatise* I.i.2). If it smells more than
one object at once, the smells likely amalgamate into a single,
complex scent that it experiences as simple and unique. If it
experiences different smells in succession, the memory of the earlier
one may linger while the other comes to be present and then it may
become aware of itself as having been something different from what it
is 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 to
smell, different, simultaneously experienced sounds would likewise be
experienced by it as one noise, but Condillac supposed that any sound
would be too different from any simultaneously occurring taste for the
two to be amalgamated, as long as either one had once been experienced
on its own. Thus, a being endowed with senses of both smell and
hearing would experience itself as being both a smell and a sound, and
so would experience itself as having a double existence
(*Treatise* I.ix.3-4). It would not, however, necessarily
experience itself as being two *things* at once, at least not
if we take the term "thing" to refer to substances.
Condillac claimed that, were each particular smell only ever
experienced in conjunction with just one particular sound, and vice
versa, the two would not be thought of as distinct things or
substances, even though they would be distinguished from one another.
Instead, the smell would be experienced as having a sound and the
sound as having a scent. Otherwise put, each would play the role of
property to the other. This is all that there ever is to our concept
of substance, insofar as that concept has any meaning at all and is
not simply a meaningless word invented by philosophers. Substance is
not some substratum in which properties inhere, but a collection of
sensations or qualities or properties commonly observed to occur
together (*Treatise* I.xii.3, III.iv.2).



As has been noted, in the *Treatise* Condillac abandoned his
earlier view that we immediately see depth. However, he continued to
maintain that light and colours are extended over the remaining two
dimensions. A being endowed with a sense of sight and presented with a
variously coloured panorama would not experience all the different
colours to be amalgamated into a point. Neither, Condillac supposed,
would it blend the different colours with one another so as to see a
uniformly coloured expanse. It would still continue to experience
itself as simply being each of the colours it sees. Insofar as these
colours are not merely multiple but outside of one another in space,
the being would experience itself as not merely having a multiple
existence, but also as being "outside" of itself. As
Condillac put it, insofar as it is red it experiences itself as being
outside of itself insofar as it is as green (*Treatise*
I.xi.8).



It was at this point that Condillac's thesis that sensing does
not entail being conscious of all that one senses came to the fore. We
would think that if colours are extended and different colours are
simultaneously seen without being blended, then there must be edges
between them, and shapes outlined by those edges. Condillac accepted
that 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 attention
to the boundaries between colours, to identify the various parts of
those boundaries, and to notice what shape they constitute. But if it
only considered colour sensations to be its own states of being, and
took pleasure or pain only in their chromatic qualities and not in
their shapes (a rather large presumption that Condillac seems not to
have realized making), it would have no reason to notice that colours
have shapes or even that they have particular locations relative to
one another. Consequently, even though it would experience colours as
being extended and outside of one another, it would not notice that
the array of simultaneously present colour sensations forms an
unbroken continuum. It would experience its coloured self merely as an
aggregate of distinct extensions, vaguely perceived as not having any
definite boundaries or shapes, and not recognized as having any
locations relative to one another. Consequently, it would have no
developed concept of space (*Treatise* I.xi.8-9).



Condillac maintained that it is only through the sense of touch that a
being first acquires an awareness of space as an external continuum
extending outwards beyond the bounds of its body, and an awareness of
other objects in this space. Touch then teaches us to attribute
smells, sounds, tastes, and colours to external objects.



Like Thomas Reid, who some ten years later also set about
investigating what each of the senses can lead us to learn, Condillac
took the tactile sensation of solidity to be crucial for the
development of an awareness of space and of external objects. Only
whereas Reid maintained that we are innately so constituted as to
understand the purely qualitative sensation of solidity as sign
signifying a quality of external objects, Condillac attempted to
explain how experiences of the sensation of solidity could put us in a
position to infer that we have spatially extended bodies and that
something else exists outside of our bodies (*Treatise*
II.v).



These inferences arise as a consequence of the comparison of two
cases, one where a being touches itself, the other where it touches
something else. A being that touches itself experiences a sensation of
solidity in its hand and an "answering" sensation of
solidity in the part of its body that it touches, thereby experiencing
itself as being solid, as being two instances of solidity, and as
being two instances of solidity outside of one another. Were the being
to lift its hand from its body and touch another part of its body, the
pair of these sensations would cease and then after a time one member
of the pair would recur in the company of a different partner. The
being would experience a new sensation of solidity outside of the one
it receives from its hand, but its awareness of the different body
parts that it touches would be like its awareness of colours. Though
experienced as being outside of one another, the touched body parts
would not be experienced as forming a continuum or as spatially
related to one another. However, were the being to move its hand over
its body without lifting it, it would experience a continuous sequence
of sensations of solidity arising from different body parts. Moving
the hand repeatedly in the same way would always produce the same
series of sensations. Condillac did not go into any more detail, but
he seems to have presumed that this would be enough to warrant the
inference 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 extended
body.



When the "statue" touches another object, it experiences
only one sensation of solidity without the answering sensation. The
absence of the second sensation is supposed to induce the judgment
that there is something else that is solid. An awareness of the shape
of objects and their locations in an ambient space is then developed
on this basis. The "statue" subsequently learns to
attribute smells and sounds to objects by discovering that moving
objects can make these sensations appear or disappear
(*Treatise* III.i-ii). Moving its hands before its eyes and
discovering how this causes colour sensations to appear or disappear
leads it to think of colour sensations at first as being on the
surface of its eyes, then as being outside of it beyond arm's
length, and then as being on the surfaces of particular tangible
objects within arms length (*Treatise* III.iii.1-19).
Having reached this stage of development, it is ready to learn to
perceive objects to be at even more remote distances through
discovering associations between such visual distance cues as the
clarity and apparent size of visual images and the distance that must
be crossed to touch an object. The interpretation of the cues then
becomes so natural that we seem to be directly seeing depth. Condillac
quietly 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 exercise
of our higher cognitive faculties is broadly the same in the
*Essay* and the *Treatise*. Such differences as there
are between the two works arise from Condillac's decision to
focus the *Treatise* on pre-linguistic abilities. In the
*Essay* Condillac defined perception as the impression first
occasioned in the mind by the action of objects on the senses. He
maintained that we are always conscious of perceptions, but that this
consciousness comes in varying degrees, which are a function of the
strength with which objects act on the senses, the degree of intrinsic
painfulness 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 receive
from our perceptions. A high degree of consciousness is what we call
attention. Our attention is naturally drawn to those perceptions that
are most pleasurable or painful, and consequently to those perceptions
that we have connected with those that are most pleasurable or
painful. Thus, experience of pleasure and pain is what first instructs
us where to focus our attention. Learning where to focus attention is
important, because many perceptions can be present at once, and a
consciousness that is evenly distributed over a great number of
perceptions knows none of them very clearly or distinctly
(*Essay* I.ii.1. SSSS1-14). 



Those perceptions that we attend to can seem to drown out the others
and produce the illusion that they alone exist, whereas those
perceptions that we are less conscious of can be so faint that it is
impossible to recall that we have had them the instant after the
stimulus that produced them fades. Those perceptions that we attend to
can also continue for some time after the stimulus that produced them
has ceased. This produces an experience that Condillac referred to as
"reminiscence" (*reminiscence*). An object
continuously acting on our sense organs causes us to now experience a
particular perception while we are simultaneously conscious of an
echo, as it were, of an identical past perception, produced just a
moment ago. Condillac's reasoning is less than explicit at this
point, but he seems to have taken this experience to provide us with
an awareness of what we might call the "pastness" of the
echo, and at the same time of the continued existence of an identical
self which experienced both the past perception and the current ones.
The idea of self is thus not the product of a Cartesian intellectual
intuition. Like the idea of one's own extended body and of other
extended things, it is discovered through having a particular kind of
sensory experience, in this case, the experience of reminiscence
(*Essay* I.ii.1. SS15).



In the *Essay*, Condillac distinguished between reminiscence,
understood as the perception that one is perceiving something that one
has perceived before, and memory. Memory is not the process of forming
an image of something one has experienced before. Condillac instead
described it as the process of forming an idea just of signs or
circumstances that have been associated with a previously experienced
object. The operation of forming an image of a previously experienced
object is not memory but "imagination," or reminiscence,
if the imagined object is thought of as one that has been experienced
before. (Since signs are not discussed in the *Treatise*, the
distinction between memory and imagination/reminiscence does not
appear in that work, and both reminiscence and what the *Essay*
calls vivid imagination are named "memory." However, it is
not clear that this is a doctrinal shift as opposed to a mere change
of emphasis mandated by the different project of the
*Treatise*.) Imagination becomes possible once a perception has
become familiar from a number of previous experiences, which give the
mind a facility to repeat that perception at will. The operation of
imagination is enhanced if the perception is simple, composed of
simple parts that are organized in accord with some guiding principle
that can be invoked in reconstructing it, or customarily connected
with other, presently occurring perceptions. Since connections with
other, customarily connected perceptions need to be noticed, and
attention is a function of need, which is in turn established by past
experience of pleasure and pain, imagination is ultimately a function
of past experience. The same can be said of memory, with the
qualification that, insofar as memory involves the recollection of
signs, 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 kinds
of signs: accidental, natural, and instituted (*Essay* I.ii.4).




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



Natural signs are the cries and gestures that we instinctively produce
upon having particular experiences. Unlike Reid, Condillac insisted
that we are not born with a knowledge of the meaning of natural signs;
we are only born with the disposition to produce them on certain
occasions. We produce them, moreover, without intending to do so and
without intending to communicate anything by them. We only discover
that they have a certain signification through hearing or seeing
ourselves or others produce the sign on characteristic occasions, and
so coming to associate the latter with the former. To go in the other
direction, and produce the sign in order to induce the thought of some
circumstance in others, would be to use the sign as an instituted
rather than a natural sign.



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



Reid was later to maintain that the creation of instituted signs
presupposes an agreement among a community of speakers, which in turn
presupposes language, and this led him to declare that there must be
some language that is innately understood rather than established by
convention. But Condillac had already explained how an artificial
language can be instituted without innately understood signs
(*Essay* II.i.1. SSSS1-4). Familiarity with the
signification of natural signs, which are instinctively produced but
not innately understood, will lead one to think of the sign upon
witnessing the object that it signifies. For example, having learned
to associate the cries that are made by those attacked by a wild
animal with those circumstances, I will think of those cries upon
seeing a wild animal approach and think of the effect that hearing
them has previously had on myself and others. It is then a small, but
momentous step to utter those cries in order, first, to signify the
approach of a wild animal to others and induce them to flee, and then
to signify this particular danger to oneself or others without
bothering to imagine an approaching wild animal, as a way of
abbreviating the process of thought. With this step, a move is made
from being affected by accidental and natural signs we happen to
chance upon in the course of experience to employing instituted signs
to stand for experiences. The first stage in taking this step is the
development of what Condillac called the "language of
action," a language composed of cries and gestures culled from
natural language. A spoken language of arbitrary sounds and a written
language are then gradually invented by users of the language of
action (*Essay* II.i.1. SSSS5-8).



Since memory just is the imagination of signs, the development of
instituted signs makes memory possible (natural and accidental signs
are only ever sensed, not remembered). The institution of signs
further allows us to set up names for groups of ideas that are too
complicated to be distinctively yet collectively imagined, such as
ideas of any number larger than six, of substances, of complex modes
(notably moral and aesthetic qualities) and of genera and species of
things (*Essay* I.iv). It is also supposed to give us control
over our imagination and an ability to govern our attention
(*Essay* I.ii.4. SS46). This allows us to reflect on other
aspects of our experience than those most immediately related to our
needs. Reflection brings connections between objects to our attention
that we would not otherwise notice and puts us in a position to refine
our language by instituting names for what we have discovered. A more
refined language facilitates yet more exact reflection, and language
and our reflective capacities proceed to work in tandem to develop our
cognitive abilities to their highest level (*Essay*
I.ii.5).


## 7. Languages as Analytic Methods



In later works (*Treatise of Animals* [1755], *Grammar*,
part of the *Course of Study for the Prince of Parma*, [1768],
and *Logic* [1780]), Condillac explained more clearly the
transition from a language of natural signs to the language of action
made up of institutional signs.



He explicitly distinguished two types of "language of
action." The first one is "natural" (and thus
appears to correspond to the use of natural signs also described in
the *Essay*). Its signs depend on the conformation of the
organs (*Treatise of Animals* II. 4, *Grammar* I.1,
*Logic* II.2). As a consequence, different species of animals
have a different natural language insofar as they have different
organs (*Treatise of Animals* II.4). This language is innate in
its expression since different signs are naturally caused by different
ideas independently of any learning. However, the interpretation of
this 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 we
interpret them: before any interpretation they are just the effects on
our body of some ideas occurring in our minds.) The second type of
language of action is institutional or artificial. Condillac makes
clear that its signs are artificial but they are not arbitrary
(*Grammar* I.1). They are not arbitrary because they are chosen
according to a rule of analogy with the natural signs
(*Grammar* I.1, *Logic* II.2).



The transition from the natural language of action to the
institutional language of action is a gradual process dictated by the
need to analyze natural signs. As Condillac explains, there is no
succession of various ideas in the mind of the speaker of the natural
language of action: the idea of the external object affecting him or
her, a judgment about the object, and the passions it arouses occur
more or less at the same time. In a similar fashion their visible and
audible natural signs (the gestures, facial expressions, and cries
made) occur more or less at the same time, although the beginning of a
decomposition of these signs is already prompted by the mere
spatio-temporal constraints of any visible action: it takes some time
to jump around or to extend one own's arm. Let's imagine a
situation in which we have a speaker of the natural language and its
first interpreter. In the presence of an animal, previously
experienced as dangerous, the speaker goes into a fright. The action
that follows appears to be confused to the interpreter, since it is
the immediate expression of a variety of ideas all occurring at the
same time in the mind of the speaker. The desire to understand leads
the interpreter to the beginning of an analysis of the action and, as
a consequence, to an analysis of ideas: for example, the attention of
the interpreter is drawn first to the object pointed at by the
speaker's finger and then to speaker's face expressing
fear. The related ideas that were simultaneous in the mind of the
speaker become successive for the interpreter. The success and failure
of the interpreter incites the speaker to be clear to herself and to
others: the speaker is motivated to analyze her own ideas so that she
may break down the corresponding visible and audible signs and be
better understood. This breaking down of signs makes the job easier
for the interpreter who in her turn replies by decomposing her own
gestures in accordance with the analysis of ideas. This gradual
process of decomposition or articulation of gestures, cries, and
facial expressions marks the passage from a natural language of action
to an institutional language of action (*Grammar* I.1 &
I.7, *Logic* II.2).



Thus, language of action and analysis of ideas mutually enrich each
other, according to a hierarchy of needs (at first, communication will
be about food and immediate dangers). The decomposing of signs
matching the analysis of ideas leads to the creation of new signs,
following a rule of analogy with the signs already known and this
process allows the consideration of further ideas. Conversely, no
consideration of more refined ideas would be possible without the
corresponding signs. An example that Condillac favors is that of the
system of numeration based on the ten fingers, which allows for the
progress of arithmetic: a single finger is first used to designate the
unit 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 of
articulated sounds emerged, as Condillac had already explained in
detail in the *Essay*: cries of different tonality were deemed
suitable to express different emotions. This phenomenon is at the
origin of the tonal accent of Greek and Latin, which Condillac took to
be closer to the first spoken languages of humanity. Onomatopeia, he
speculated, may have been at the origin of certain words used to
designate certain things, while other words were chosen by way of
analogy: for example, words for mental operations originally indicated
words for the operations of the sense-organs (*Essay* II.i.2-3,
*Grammar* I.7). Grammar gradually emerged, first reflecting the
most basic needs of humanity and then gaining in complexity as needs
multiplied. (Condillac makes the conjecture that in the syntax of
these first languages the object of the action came first and preceded
the verb, since the object was the most vital point of interest for
primitive people: *Essay* II.i.9, *Grammar* II.8)



The first spoken languages of humanity combined a language of
articulated sounds with the language of action. They resembled more a
kind of chant accompanied by a "dance" of gestures and
steps: this fact also explains why a Roman or Greek orator could be
understood by a large crowd of people, while a modern Frenchman could
not (*Essay* II.i.1-3).



After a phase in which the language of action had been fruitfully
combined with the language of articulated sounds, different elements
of this mix began to develop autonomously. They also recombined later
in various guises. On this basis, Condillac attempted to account for
the development of arts and forms of expression such as music, dance,
theatre, poetry. For example, the language of action can dispense
altogether with sounds of any kind, while extending the range of its
expressive gestures: already impressed by accounts of ancient
pantomimes, Condillac saw this point confirmed by the modern
development of the language of signs for deaf-and-dumb people in the
school of the Abbe de l'Epee (*Essay*
II.i.4, *Grammar* I.1). By developing only the tonal part of
the sounds, the language of action can turn into music, unaccompanied
by any words and gestures (*Essay* II.i.5).



The details of this account of the development of arts are highly
debatable, but Condillac thought that on its basis he had been able to
explain the reasons for some disputes in art criticism. Whatever
worked for an ancient language does not work for a modern language
that has shed most of its language of action component. Thus we should
not expect modern tragedy in French to replicate modes of expression
precisely designed for a more expressive language like that of ancient
tragedy. (*Essay* II.i.3)



The transition from the natural language of action to the artificial
language of action and from this latter to the language of articulate
sounds is recapitulated in an amplified form in the general movement
of arts and civilization away from primitive forms of languages that
are more expressive of emotions towards forms of language that are
more descriptive. All historical languages can be considered as
"analytic methods," since their grammar, prosody, and
vocabulary reflect a certain stage in the development of analysis.
However, in the formation of historical languages various
contingencies such as the climate and the temper of people played a
role. Historical languages contain many errors made in the analysis of
facts and these errors are passed on from generation to generation
(*Grammar* I.1-8, *Logic* II.3-4). Science should strive
to be based on a "well-formed language." Late in his life,
Condillac took algebra to be the best model of such a well-formed
language (*Logic* II.5). In algebra we show clearly and by a
limited number of steps how to find certain unknown quantities given
certain known quantities. Condillac took himself to have done
something similar for philosophy. What is initially known is
sensation. Condillac took himself to have shown in his work the
genesis of all mental life from this primitive element (*Logic*
II.7-8).


## 8. The Animal Soul, Moral Laws, and Immortality



At the beginning the *Essay*, Condillac demonstrated that the
soul is immaterial, in opposition to Locke's hypothesis of
thinking matter. According to Condillac, God cannot give to matter the
power to think. The operations of thought show by themselves the unity
of consciousness, and the unity of consciousness is only accountable
by presupposing a simple and indivisible subject of inherence for
consciousness itself. Condillac presents this line of argument by
saying that individual perceptions are indivisible in their nature and
so they cannot inhere in different substances. Even assuming that each
individual perception inheres in a separate individual substance, the
act of comparing perceptions could not occur without a simple and
indivisible substratum. "However, a mass matter is not one; it
is a multitude" or, as Condillac also said, matter is an
assemblage or collection of things (*Essay* I.i.1 SS6).
Therefore, the soul must be an immaterial substance.



At the same time, Condillac made clear that after the fall of the
first man and woman the soul has become dependent on the body: the
building blocks of mental life, sensations, are occasioned by various
physical motions caused by the external objects affecting the senses
and the nervous system (*Essay* I.i.1 SS8). If higher
cognitive functions are ultimately to be explained merely in terms of
transformations of sensations, then Condillac was left with the
problem of showing the precise line of demarcation between humans and
other animals. Two solutions to this problem were foreclosed to
Condillac. One possible solution was the view of Aristotle: the human
soul is characterized by a higher rational part in addition to the
vegetative and animal parts (the vegetative part being responsible for
nutrition and growth, and the animal part being responsible for
sensation and motion). Condillac's sensism argued precisely
against this essentialist view of the difference between higher and
lower cognitive functions and by extension against the essentialist
view of the difference between humans and animals. The second
solution, which in Condillac's times was proposed by Buffon in his
*Natural History* (1749-53), was the Cartesian hypothesis of a
mechanical soul. According to Descartes, only the rational soul is
responsible for consciousness. Animals, being devoid of this kind of
soul, are mere machines and thus incapable of being conscious.
Condillac, on his part, was rather inclined to endorse the
common-sense view that makes animals capable of sensation and thus of
consciousness.



In the *Essay*, Condillac had identified the use of language as
necessary for higher cognitive functions, including memory, the
control of the imagination, and reflection. Animals, which at best
have the use of natural signs, can only recall (imagine) absent
objects if a present object has been habitually associated with them.
Unable to use at will signs standing for absent objects, they are
without memory. Thus they live from moment to moment, without any
proper notion of a continued past existence in which various events
are connected. Everyday is like a new day for them, and they simply
repeat habitual patterns of behaviour most conducive to their
survival. They are at best capable of what Condillac calls
'reminiscence' and thus they can recognize an object as
previously experienced. The case of a boy who grew up among bears in
the woods between Lithuania and Poland appeared to provide
confirmation for animals' mental inferiority: found unable to
speak, this youth only gradually learned the language, and afterwards
could not recall his past life nor did he have any notion of having
spent many years in the woods (*Essay* I.iv.2
SSSS23-25). Another case, that of a deaf-and-dumb boy who
suddenly recovered his hearing, further confirmed Condillac's
hypothesis: after a period of learning, the boy confirmed that while
he was deaf he could not attach any meaning to the sign of the cross
that he saw his parents doing, nor did he have any notion of death,
life after death, or God (*Essay* I.iv.2 SSSS13-22).
(Condillac regretted that the examiners of the case had asked the boy
merely about his religious beliefs.) Subsequently, as is evident in
his correspondence with Cramer and Maupertuis, Condillac had come to
believe that he had drawn too sharp a line between lower and higher
cognitive functions and that thus he had in effect reintroduced a
dualism of reason and sensation in the mind.



Condillac addressed this problem in the *Treatise of
Sensations* by recognizing a level of pre-linguistic reflection
that is common to animals and human beings. At the same time,
Condillac insisted drawing a distinction between the pre-linguistic
capacities of human beings and those of animals. He described at
length how the statue acquires the ideas of extended objects by touch
and how it comes to refer the causes of sensations received by the
other senses to these objects. Touch is considered as a sort of
pre-linguistic instrument of analysis: it originally discriminates
parts outside of parts in its objects and by its means, sensations
become ideas, that is, they acquire a reference to external objects.
Condillac then argued that animals must be inferior to humans because
their sense of touch is not as developed as that of human beings. He
thought that human hands and fingers are uniquely adapted to receiving
a multiplicity of different impressions and therefore the human sense
of touch is able to discriminate more accurately the qualities of
objects than that of other animals. From this difference of degree,
Condillac went on to argue for a difference of kind between the soul
of animals and that of humans: God in his benevolence would not trap a
soul capable of superior operations in an inferior body like that of
animals; therefore, the soul of animals must be of an inferior kind
(*Treatise*, The Plan of This Work, Note).



In the *Treatise of Animals* Condillac further developed his
views. He repeated what he had said in the *Treatise of
Sensations*: animals are capable of pre-linguistic reflection,
just like humans. They judge and compare ideas and by these means
discover how to do things necessary for their survival. By this kind
of reflection, all animals learn the proper use of their organs, in
order to flee what is dangerous and search what is useful to them.
Reflection is at the origin of the formation habits, like the one that
makes us avoid a falling object that is heavy. As the actions
originally done deliberately by reflection are gradually turned into
habits, "the animal touches, sees, walks without reflecting on
what 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 of
behaviour, but rather a well-developed habit (*Treatise of
Animals* II.5). This habit bears witness to the effort of
inventive reflection that originally taught animals the use of their
organs: birds have to learn how build their nests and beavers have to
learn how to build their shelters (*Treatise of Animals*
II.2).



Condillac, however, thinks animals are less inventive than humans
because they have fewer needs and also "fewer means to multiply
their own ideas and make combinations of all sort" (*Treatise
of Animals*, II.2). In different words, animals are more easily
satisfied with their lot and they are less intelligent. Contrary to
what many authors say, animals of the same species do not do the same
things because they imitate each other. Rather, they all end up doing
the same things, because they have the same needs and the same organs
perfectly suited to the satisfaction of those needs. Thus, each animal
acquires the same habits as any other animal of the same species,
whether placed alone or in company. Paradoxically, humans end up being
different from each other precisely because they are the only animals
that imitate each other. There is relatively little communication of
ideas by way of language among animals: their needs are more limited
and therefore they do not need to learn from each other as much as
humans do. Humans, on the contrary, desire to learn from each other
more and so imitate each other. As they communicate more with each
other, they also discover the differences in their talents and
interests and put them to use for themselves and others (*Treatise
of Animals* II.3). Animals keep to their subsistence economy,
while humans develop a system of division of labour in order to
satisfy their needs: one might start by trying to be a skilled hunter
like his neighbour only to discover that he had better leave hunting
to his neighbor and concentrate on the manufacture of bows and arrows.
Since, individuals are often placed in different circumstances
requiring different solutions, new needs emerge. As new needs emerge,
useful discoveries are made and social ties get stronger. Just like in
the *Essay*, the intertwined factors of language and social
intercourse make humans superior to animals in their capacities.



The difference between humans and animals is still characterized by
Condillac as difference of degree. For example, animals have a natural
language of action, just like humans, and they use it to communicate
with each other their needs and to help each other. The signs of this
language vary among different species not only according to the
different ideas they have but also according to the variety of organs
(external conformation) they possess, since these organs condition the
way ideas can be expressed. Animals of different species whose
external conformation resembles each other can communicate with each
other, at least to a certain extent: Condillac describes the case of
dogs that can go as far as understanding not simply the language of
action but also the language of articulate sounds of humans. But
animals whose external conformation is widely different from ours
cannot communicate with us, as the case of the parrot shows: it can
articulate sounds, but both his ideas and his language of action is
widely different from ours (*Treatise of Animals* II.4).



Condillac seems to have thought that only humans have organs that
allow for the language of action to be relatively more expressive,
thus keeping a kind of parallelism between the cognitive capacities of
the mind and the complexity of the structure of the body (a complexity
not simply reducible to that of the brain but also including that of
the peripheral organs).



What ultimately sets apart humans from animals is the knowledge of God
and morals. In the middle of the *Treatise of Animals*,
Condillac inserts a long chapter he claims to have submitted as an
anonymous dissertation to the Academy of Berlin just a few years
before. Here Condillac proceeds to demonstrate the existence of God.
Condillac insists on a natural progression of ideas: at first, humans
realized that their happiness or unhappiness depended completely on
external causes and posited deities equivalent to the powers of
nature. Then they came to posit a first cause in order to avoid an
infinite regression in explanation of these natural powers. Finally,
the presence of design leads them to recognize this cause as
intelligent and free (*Treatise of Animals* II.6). While the
details of this chapter are not original, they set the stage for
Condillac'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 realize
how necessary it is to help each other and refrain from certain kinds
of action. Thus "they come to agree on what is allowed and what
is forbidden, and their conventions become laws to which action must
be subordinated: this is the beginning of morality"
(*Treatise of Animals*, II.7). 



At first they think of these laws as conventions they designed to
enhance their well-being, given the needs that they have and the
scarcity of means to satisfy them. But as they discover the existence
of God, they recognize that God, by disposing of everything in nature,
is the ultimate source of goods and evils that may befall human
beings. Moral laws then acquire a providential meaning: by obeying
these laws, humans obey God himself, who is the author of nature. The
laws of morality are both natural laws and laws of divine institution,
since nature is God's creation. But given that the proportion of
goods and evils in this life does not correspond to the merits and
demerits of individuals, it is necessary to postulate a life after
death where the just will be rewarded and the wicked will be
punished.



Thus, According to Condillac, the immortality of the human soul is not
a consequence of its immateriality. All created beings, whether
immaterial or material, are naturally contingent: "if we
consider only the nature of the soul, it can cease to be. Who created
it can let it go back to nothingness. It will continue to exist only
because God is just. But in this way immortality is guaranteed to the
soul as if it were a consequence of its essence" (*Treatise
of Animals* II.7). Immortality is guaranteed to the human soul
since the human soul is capable of knowing God's laws and God is
supremely just: only in this derivative sense, "immortality is
guaranteed to the soul *as if it were* a consequence of its
essence."



Unlike human beings, animals are incapable of knowing moral laws. God
has not granted them the means to distinguish between what is right
and what is wrong and so "he has shown that he does not expect
anything from them" (*Treatise of Animals* II.7).
"Nothing is enjoined and nothing is forbidden to beasts. Their
only rule is force. Incapable of merit and demerit, they have no right
to divine justice. Their soul is thus mortal" (*Treatise of
Animals* II.7). But the soul of animals is immaterial, just like
the one of humans. Thus, we see how Condillac was able to separate the
question of the immateriality of the soul from the question of the
immortality of the soul.



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


## 9. Commerce and Government



In the *Treatise of Sensations*, Condillac said that "The
words 'goodness' and 'beauty' express the
properties through which things contribute to our pleasure. As a
result, every sentient being has ideas of goodness and of beauties
relative to himself" (*Treatise* IV.iii.1). He further
said that "the good and the beautiful are not at all absolute: they
are relative to the nature of the man who judges them and to his
makeup" (*Treatise*, IV.iii.3). He clarified in a footnote
that he was not referring to goodness and beauty in themselves but
about the judgments that a man, who lives alone (as the statue of the
*Treatise of Sensations*), may make of them: not everything
that such a man judges as good will be morally good, nor everything he
judges beautiful will be really beautiful. Indeed we have seen that
Condillac thought that people in society could come to an agreement
about moral laws and that these should be taken as objectively valid.
At the same time, Condillac insisted on a certain degree of relativity
in the estimation of goods and evils. The human stage of development
is characterized by a multiplication of needs, and it appears that
this by itself would allow for a variety in preferences, given the
different conditions of people. Humans are the first creatures that
can turn self-love in a proper desire for self-preservation, since
animals cannot have the notion of death. But humans may conceive of a
variety of ways of satisfying the same material needs. Moreover, their
needs multiply well beyond the mere material sphere of
self-preservation. To describe this potentially unlimited development
of needs, Condillac went as far as to say that even if humans were
able to satisfy all their needs they would still be unable to satisfy
their most pressing need, which is the need to desire (*Treatise of
Animals* II.8).



In one of his later works, *Commerce and Government* (1776),
Condillac considered what he took to be some of the economic and
political implications of his views. The book was published three
months before Adam Smith's *Wealth of Nations*, and it is
rightly considered a milestone in the tradition of
*laissez-faire* economics and classical liberalism.



Condillac began with an examination of economic value, which he
thought was determined by the utility and relative scarcity of a good
(*Commerce and Government* I.1). Since people in different
situations of life estimate goods differently, social cooperation
based on the division of labour becomes possible through the market.
As Condillac said, thus anticipating by one century the insights of
marginalists, in every voluntary market transaction each party gives
what he or she values less in exchange for what he or she values more
(*Commerce and Government* I.6). It follows that every free
exchange is to the mutual benefit of both parties. Condillac justified
property rights in a Lockian fashion by original occupation,
appropriation by labour, or voluntary transfer (*Commerce and
Government* I.12). The government's main task is to maintain the
order of society both internally and externally (*Commerce and
Government* I.10), but the welfare of citizens is better
guaranteed by the removal of barriers to free enterprise and free
trade, as Condillac argued at length in the second part of the work.
Government's various "blows" against the freedom of
commerce, such as taxes on consumption, monopolies, cartels, trade
barriers, price controls, currency manipulations, public debt, and
wars, only benefit a few privileged people who are politically
connected. Economic interventionism leads to an unhealthy and
"excessive" multiplication of needs in the group of people
privileged by these measures. This multiplication of needs is
manifested 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 a
taste for luxury, should be contrasted with the healthy development of
needs that characterizes the rise of humans above the mere level of
animal economy described by Condillac in the *Treatise of
Animals*.) On the other hand, economic interventionism pushes back
the majority into a sort of animal economy, where they are constantly
threatened by poverty and starvation. Thus, policies of economic
intervention exacerbate social inequalities. The equilibrating
mechanism of the market would mitigate inequalities by lowering the
prices of goods thanks to open competition among entrepreneurs
(*Commerce and Government* II.1). Whatever inequalities remain
in a free market society would just reflect a difference in talents
and would rather be to the benefit of all. Certainly, the desire for
human welfare cannot legitimately justify measures such as price
controls on goods of first necessity such as wheat. These measures are
not only unjust but also turn out to be counterproductive,
notwithstanding the best intentions of advocates of restrictions on
private property rights: "The rights of humanity opposed to those of
property! What gibberish!" (*Commerce and Government*
II.15)


## 10. Problems with Condillac's Sensationism


### 10.1 Idealism



In the *Essay* Condillac not only claimed that sensations are
occasioned by the action of external objects on our sense organs, but
also that they are images or representations of those objects. More
precisely, he claimed that the objects that affect our sense organs
must be extended and hence material things, though they may not have
the precise shapes or sizes that our senses represent them as having,
and though they do not have colours on their surfaces or bear
qualities of smell and taste (*Essay* I.i.2.
SSSS11-12). But if "we never leave ourselves and
never perceive anything other than our own thoughts," as
Condillac claimed at the outset of the *Essay* (I.i.1.
SS1), then what could entitle us to maintain that our sensations
bear this degree of resemblance to external objects or that there even
is an external world containing objects that occasion our sensations?




In the *Essay,* Condillac contented himself with replying to
this question by claiming that while we have a clear idea what it
means to attribute extension to an object, we have no clear idea what
it means to say that objects are coloured or scented, and that while
there is evidence that proves that we do not always perceive the sizes
or shapes of objects correctly, there is no evidence that proves that
we are wrong to think that external objects have some form of
extension (*Essay* I.i.2. SSSS11-13). Neither
claim is compelling. Indeed, it is astounding how someone familiar
with Descartes's dreaming argument could have made the latter
one. But both were asserted without any further elaboration or
defence. As Diderot later pointed out in his *Letter on the
Blind*, for Condillac to rest his case against scepticism about
the existence of an external world on such facile grounds was to
ignore the powerful reasons for denying the existence of material
things that had been articulated by Berkeley.



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



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


### 10.2 Materialism



Condillac's account of sensation also fit uneasily with his
claim that the mind is immaterial. He took sensations to be
modifications of the mind's being. He also stipulated that such
things as colours and scents are sensations. In the *Essay*, he
specified that there is nothing in bodies that resembles colours or
scents and that these qualities are something that belongs to sentient
creatures alone (*Essay* I.i.2. SS12). In the
*Treatise*, employing a striking turn of phrase, he claimed
that while we might think of a being who possessed only the sense of
smell as a being who scents a rose, for itself this being will simply
be the smell of a rose. "From its perspective," he wrote,
"the odours are nothing other than its own modifications or
manners of being" (*Treatise* I.i.2). The same holds of
colours. A being whom we would describe as seeing red would at first
experience itself as simply being red. Touch would instruct it to
attribute this redness to other objects. But this instruction cannot
be known to be correct, whereas there can be no question that the
sensation of red is a modification of the being of a sentient
creature. Red is not, therefore, what might be called the intentional
object of an act of sensing, or if it is, it is so only derivatively;
it is primarily a quality of the sentient being, who experiences
itself as literally turning red when it has this sensation
(*Treatise* I.xi.8). 



The problem with this position becomes clear when it is considered
that Condillac also maintained that colours are extended. In the
*Essay* he claimed that were we to have no other sensations
than those of light and colour they would "trace
(*traceront*) extension, lines, and figures before our
eyes" so that we would find these ideas to be contained in our
sensations (*Essay* I.i.2. SS9). Moreover, this discovery
is not an effect of learning or association. Extension and shape are
original features possessed by visual sensations, discernible simply
by attentive reflection. Someone blind since birth and newly made to
see would not originally perceive everything before him as if it were
a "point" (i.e., an unextended spot of colour), but would
experience "light distributed (*repandue*) in
every direction [outwards as well as above, below, to the left and to
the right]" (*Essay* I.vi. SSSS12, 14). Condillac
continued to retain this view in the *Treatise*, though with
some refinements: Whereas in the *Essay* he had maintained that
colours are extended over all three dimensions, in the
*Treatise* he endorsed the Berkeleyan position that we learn to
perceive depth. He also maintained that we do not immediately
appreciate that colours are bounded and figured even in two
dimensions, but need to learn that they have these features. But he
continued to maintain that the colours we originally experience are
extended over two dimensions. "Colour presents [*offre*]
extension to the soul that it modifies," he wrote in the
*Treatise*, "because it is itself extended. This is a
fact that cannot be brought into doubt. It is demonstrated by
observation" (*Treatise* I.xi.8). Insofar as colours are
extended they must have shapes, even if those shapes are not
immediately perceived. The process of learning to perceive shape does
not transform our colour sensations and lead them to acquire
properties they did not previously have; it merely leads us to
discover ones that were there all along. This is the point of claiming
that not everything that is necessarily involved with a sensation need
be perceived by it.



Condillac thus appears to have been committed to four mutually
antagonistic propositions:


1. Colours are extended.
2. Colours are sensations.
3. Sensations are modifications of the mind's being.
4. The mind is unextended.



Hume had confronted the conflict between these propositions by denying
(3) and (4). For Hume, our visual impressions are compounds that
consist of a number of minimally visible, coloured points that are
disposed alongside another in space, but the notion that impressions
and ideas inhere in some mental substance is unintelligible, whether
this substance is taken to be material or immaterial. Reid, in
contrast, had insisted on (3) and (4) but had declared that the term
"colour" is used equivocally in (1) and (2). We experience
sensations of colour, which are unextended states of feeling
experienced by the mind in just the same way as it experiences
feelings of pleasure or pain. But colour terminology is most often
used to refer to some unknown thing in external objects that causes us
to experience these sensations. These external, so-called
"coloured" objects are conceived as being extended and
figured, but the mind does not become aware of them by contemplating
some internal, iconic representation or image. It has a thought that
refers to them. Affection of our sense organs does not produce an
impression or image; it occasions a thought. The thought itself is
unextended, like the mind whose state it is, but it is a thought
*of* or *about* an object. The object is thought to
possess a quality of extension, as well as to be a cause of a certain
concomitant sensation of colour. But the thought *that* this
object is extended and a cause of a sensation of colour is itself
neither extended nor coloured. So for Reid, either
"colours" are powers in extended, external objects to
bring about sensations in us, in which case they are not sensations
had by the mind, or they are sensations had by the mind, in which case
they are not extended. 



However, unlike Hume and Reid, Condillac was unwilling to deny or
qualify any of (1)-(4). Unlike Hume, he insisted on the existence of
an immaterial mind who is the subject of sensations of colour
(*Essay* I.i.1. SS6). And unlike Reid, he insisted that
colours are unequivocally both modifications of the mind's being
and literally extended. These commitments exposed him to charges of
tacit materialism. Most notably, Rene Reaumur, writing
under the pseudonym of the Abbe de Lignac, observed in the
supplements to his *Lettres a un American*
(1756), that just as Condillac had accused Buffon of supposing that
machines have a quality that is essential to spirits, sensibility, so
Condillac was liable to the charge of supposing that spirits have a
quality that belongs uniquely to machines, three dimensionality.



Condillac's response to this charge, in his "Lettre de M.
l'abbe de Condillac a l'auteur des Lettres
a un American" (1756, and appended to subsequent
editions of the *Treatise on Animals*) was to claim that,
"If I say that our sensations give us an idea of extension, it
is only because we take them for qualities of objects when we refer
them to something external. But I have proven many times that they
certainly do not give us this idea when we consider them as a manner
of being of our soul." This echoes claims made in the
*Essay* and the *Treatise.* In the *Essay,*
Condillac claimed that we attribute the extension or shape we find in
colours to something outside of us rather than to ourselves considered
as thinking subjects (I.i.2. SS11), presumably because extension
is incompatible with the simplicity that must be ascribed to a
thinking being. In almost the same breath, he claimed that we are
wrong to imagine that the chromatic quality of colours (as opposed to
the extension and shape they map out) actually lies on the surface of
external objects, purportedly because we have no clear idea of what it
would mean for a body to be coloured (I.i.2. SS12). But such
claims are hardly adequate to avoid the problem and perhaps not even
coherent. Either the chromatic qualities that we experience as
modifications of our being are extended or they are not. If they are
extended, then the claim that we do not recognize this fact when we
think of them as modifications of our own being is merely an evasion.
If they are not extended, then if we never experience anything other
than our own sensations, as Condillac claimed at the outset of the
*Essay*, it is mysterious how we come to attribute extension to
external objects.



In the *Treatise*, Condillac was no longer willing to declare
that objects can be known to be either extended or colourless. He
simply claimed that its experiences would lead his
"statue" to first conceive of colours as modifications of
its own being, then to conceive them as modifications of its extended
sense organs, and finally to conceive them as modifications of
external objects (*Treatise* III.3). But this was not to answer
the metaphysical problem but rather to ignore it. If colours are in
fact extended, as the *Treatise* continued to insist, yet the
mind ultimately only knows its own sensations, however variously they
might be transformed by cognitive processing, then we can only come to
be in a position to attribute colours to external objects if we first
experience those colours, which suggests that they must modify our
being.



Though Condillac's official reply to the charge of materialism,
as expressed in the letter to Lignac, is something of a
disappointment, scholars have occasionally read the *Treatise*
as taking some steps towards a more radical way of dealing with the
problem. Recall that in that work Condillac advanced the view that
even though colours are in fact extended and bounded, it is not
intuitively evident that they are. We need to learn to see their
shapes. Interestingly, what teaches us to see these shapes are tactile
sensations of solidity and observations of the appearance and
disappearance of colours consequent upon moving our hands before our
eyes. Since neither sensations of solidity nor the tactile sensations
that accompany hand motions are patently extensive in character, and
colours themselves might as well not be so far as the early learner is
concerned, some scholars have suggested that the Condillac of the
*Treatise* meant to claim that our perceptions of space are
constructed from raw data that, as they are at first experienced by
the mind, are in no way spatial. Insofar as the *Treatise* does
move towards this more radical view, it can be seen as a precursor of
such 19th century Berkeleyan theories of vision as those of Steinbuch,
Mill, Helmholtz, and Wundt. However, those later theories invoked
notions of local signs (sensations specific to which nerve is being
stimulated) and made explicit appeals to kinaesthetic sensations that
are simply absent from Condillac's work. Lacking those notions,
Condillac claimed that an awareness of space cannot be generated from
aspatial sensations, and he represented his statue, not as
constructing space, but as discovering the spatial features that were
already present in its sensations from the first. Viewing him as a
precursor of 19th century Berkeleyanism risks overlooking this fact
and, as a consequence, misrepresenting his thought.


### 10.3 Memory and Liberty



In both the *Essay* and the *Treatise* Condillac set out
to show that all of our cognitive and conative faculties are generated
from sensation and can be derived from that operation alone. To this
end he identified perception, consciousness, and attention as all
being different aspects of the one operation of sensation. Perception
is the impression sensation makes upon the mind, consciousness is this
impression considered as something experienced by the mind, and
attention is simply a more vivid perception. But when Condillac came
to account for memory and reminiscence, this project stalled. It is
not implausible to maintain that a sensation might continue to be
experienced after the object that occasioned it has ceased to act on
the sense organ. But such an "echo" of a past sensation is
itself a present phenomenon. It might be fainter than other sensations
that are now occurring, but being experienced to be faint is not the
same thing as being thought to have originated in the past. Rather
than explain how sensation can give rise to an awareness of pastness
Condillac simply helped himself to the notion. In the *Essay*,
he defined "reminiscence" as the awareness that a
perception has been had "before" without anywhere
explaining how the idea that one thing can be "before"
another could arise simply from sensation (*Essay* I.ii.1.
SS15). In the *Treatise* he distinguished the memory of a
sensation from a current sensation by calling the former "weakly
sensing what one was (*sentir foiblement ce qu'elle a
ete*)" and the latter "vividly sensing
what one is (*sentir vivement ce qu'elle est*)."
But then he immediately went on to say that recalled sensations can
sometimes be more vivid than current ones (*Treatise*
I.ii.8-9). So what necessarily distinguishes remembered
sensation from current sensation, on this account, is just that
remembered sensations are of what "was." But this is not
to explain how we could get the idea that a sensation is of what was
as opposed to what is. 



Similar difficulties arise in connection with the will. In the
*Essay*, Condillac supposed that the imagination is initially
outside of our control. Unless driven by need to conceive the means of
achieving an end, we imagine what we do only because in the course of
experience we sense accidental or natural signs that suggest
particular ideas to us. The use of instituted signs is supposed to
change this circumstance and give us a new ability to control our
thoughts (*Essay* I.ii.4.SSSS45-46). But it is
not clear why this should be the case (note, in this regard, the
apparent contradiction between *Essay* I.ii.4. SS39 and
SS46). Just because a being has acquired the ability to produce
signs in order to induce thought, it does not follow that this ability
must be under the subject's voluntary control, and if the
production of instituted signs is outside of our control, it is not
clear how their use can give us a power to control our thoughts.



The "sensationist" label notwithstanding, there is some
suggestion that Condillac may have taken both memory and volition to
be primitive functions of the soul that are not in fact reducible to
sensation. In the *Essay* he described our awareness of the
temporal sequence of our perceptions as a "fundamental
experience (*premiere experience*)"
(*Essay* I.ii.1. SS15) and in the Dissertation on Liberty
(SSSS9-10) he seems to have taken freedom of choice and
the ability to spontaneously direct attention to be original abilities
that the soul has whenever it is not impelled by some pressing
need.



These views of memory and will are not necessarily inconsistent with
Condillac's sensationism, his repeated claims to derive all the
mind's capacities from the operation of sensation
notwithstanding. There are stronger and weaker ways of understanding
Condillac's sensationism. On the stronger understanding,
Condillac meant to say that sensation produces all of the other
capacities of the soul. On the weaker understanding, he only meant to
say that sensation instructs us in the proper employment of our
capacities. The weaker reading is compatible with allowing original,
irreducible powers of memory and free choice, provided that we take
those powers to be ones that we do not at first know how to
effectively direct or employ. The stronger reading attributes an
absolutely rigorous empiricism to Condillac -- one that does not
admit that the mind is endowed with any innate abilities. It is not
clear what Condillac would have had to gain by insisting on such a
rigorous empiricism. Locke's rejection of innate ideas and
innate principles was bound up with a reaction to unquestioned
authority and a demand that all knowledge claims be demonstrable by
appeal to common experience. But allowing that we possess innate
cognitive capacities and innate conative abilities does not interfere
with 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. The
pedagogical and methodological conclusions that Condillac most wanted
to draw still follow from that qualification, without having to invoke
the strong reading.