Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/280

CONDILLAC Thus, in their own inarticulate way, the sensationalists are compelled to postulate the synthetic unity of Kant. And just as it is present in the first fibre of personality, the first flash of self-consciousness, its various modes of opera tion are no less essentially present throughout all the subsequent fabric of experience, and in the full sunlight of conscious life. To trace and treat them is the work of philosophy proper, which may be briefly distinguished from the natural sciences as that which deals with the universal aspect of thought, while they deal with the particular. Both are necessary factors of concrete thought. Experience will never spring out of categories alone, nor will it arise out of particulars alone. The method of observation proper to the natural sciences may lead us to the border ground of the two territories, but for exploring the region of the universals there is needed a keener vision and a deeper principle. It is the fault of Condillac, as of all the sensationalists, that he does not apply the analytic method faithfully enough to bring himself consciously face to face with the universal factor of experience. It is interesting to note in him the progress towards a more thorough use of analysis. In the Essai sur VOrigine he was of opinion that any single sensation was an idea, i.e., representative of external entities, and that a single sense is adequate to produce an experience more limited in degree, but the same in kind as ours. So he maintained against Locke and Berkeley that we can know through sight alone the magnitudes, distances, and situations of objects. His position then much resembled that of the so-called common- sense philosophers. To him an external world was as necessarily present in sense as to them; and his criticism of Spinoza, that the assumption in his definitions of what he meant to prove by means of them made his work easy, may very aptly be applied to the Essai sur VOriyine. If a complete experience is given in a single sensation, it will be easy to find it in a succession of them. But the Traite des Sensations marks an advance upon these views. Now a sensation is not perse an idea. A stricter use of analysis detects other elements in ideas. Condillac saw from the first that a sensation to be an idea must be representative of something out of the present consciousness. Now he sees that, to be so, it must either exist in the memory or be modified by judgments. That is to say, it must be the sensation of a series of sensations, which has the marvellous power of returning upon itself ; or, in more intelligible language, it must be held in the grasp of the synthetic unity of thought. In the Origine Condillac really develops expsrience out of perceptions, or sensations regarded as synonymous with ideas. In the Traits des Sensations he has come to know that a sensation as such is not an idea, But although he still professes to develop all the mental operations out of sensation, he is as far as ever from bridging over the gap between sensations and ideas, or even from acknowledging in his actual procedure the existence of such a gap at all. When Condillac, largely owing, as he tells us to the influence of Mile Ferrand, abandoned the position of the Essai sur 1 Oriyine, that by sight alone we can judge of the magnitudes, distances, <tc., of objects he seems to have been in unstable equilibrium between sensationalism and a very different mode of philosophizing. In the Traite des Sensations he shows how these judgments are founded not upon the direct intimations of sight, but upon an association that has sprung up between the sensations which we owe to different senses. The mind, he sees clearly, has come to deal with relations among sensations. He even goes the length of saying that the idea of impenetrability cannot be a sensation, but is a judgment founded on sensation. He was then on the verge of intellect proper, and within sight of something deeper than sensation. The intelligible order of things is dimly seen by him to be the reality fot us, and he tries hard, in the Traite des Sensations, to show how we become aware of it through the interaction of the different senses. But just then he falls back again into sensationalism. He loses hold of judgment as the all- important element, and conceives the senses in some strange way to acquire a habit of immediately informing us of what a moment before he saw it needed an act of judgment to reach. For an instant he had a glimpse of thought as constitutive of experience. But forthwith the vision pass^, and its place is taken by a mysterious and totally unintelligible habit or instinct of sense. Accordingly, in the Art de Penser. he is back again to the gross statements of the Origine, that we may find in sensation the ideas of extension and figure, and perceive as distinctly and clearly that they do not belong to us, or to what in us is the subject of thought, but to something outside of us. It is not difficult to see how his theory of reason sprang out of his theory of the origin of knowledge, for of course his. psychology was thought out before his logic. If all is sensation, and we can never get beyond sensation, then our advancing knowledge must be only a ringing of the changes upon the primary sensation. The latest results will be identical in the fullest sense with the first begin nings, and all science will be reduced to a development of language, a series of identical expressions, to which we are driven by the limitation of our faculties preventing us from seeing the identity between remote terms. Thus, in LArt de Raisonner, he shows at length that the demonstration of the rule for finding the area of a triangle is necessitated by our inability to see the identity between the idea we have of " measure " and that we have of the product of the height of the triangle by half the base. Similarly, the argument in the Traite des Sensations is necessitated by our inability to see the essential identity between sensation and thought. Every successive proposition is identical in idea with the preceding one, and differs from it only in expres sion. There is DO advance or development in matter. In his psychology it is the same sensation throughout. In his theory of reasoning it is always the same idea throughout. The difference is merely in form, and it is not difficult to see how, in a philosophy which neglects intelligible relations, and ignores the truth that they are constitutive of experience, form must of necessity be degraded and become mere form of words. This is the complaint which is urged by Hegel against all the natural sciences. He, so to speak, accepts the verdict of Condillac upon them. So far as they attempt to prove anything, he says, they are a mere string of identical propositions. But to Hegel form was everything. The development of the notion is what constitutes the universe ; and accordingly he thought that a different formula of reasoning must be found from any hitherto recognized. Syllogistic reasoning is not adequate to any real development of form. It sinks down into a mere change of verbal expression, as Condillac had asserted, while the matter of thought is left precisely where it was. But matter is only the potentiality of form, and form is no mere transformation of verbal expression, but an organic growth of thought. Is there any standing ground between the identity of Condillac and the dialectic of Hegel 1 There are many later systems which it would be interest ing to compare with the thoughts of Condillac, notably the psychology of Beneke, the later views of Mr Lewes, and the logical doctrines of Professor Jevons. There is a remarkable similarity between the identity of Condillac and the substitution of similars of Professor Jevons. The logical machine is almost like a realized ideal of Condillac; and Professor Jevons s new system of symbols would probably have been hailed by Condillac as the langue li.en

faite, the counterpart of algebra, for which he sighed in vain.