Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/269

CON DILL AC. 24J formation of general notions are "at bottom the same" ; the passions are "only" various kinds of desire; understanding and will spring "from one root," etc. The demand for a single fundamental psychical power comes from Descartes, and Condillac does not hesitate to retain the word penscr itself as a general designation for all mental functions. Similarly he holds fast to the dualism between extension and sensation as reciprocally incompati- ble properties, opposes the soul as the "simple" subject of thought to "divisible" matter, and sees in the affections of the bodily organs merely the "occasions" on which the soul of itself alone exercises its sensitive activity. Even free- dom — the supremacy of thought over the passions — is maintained, in striking contrast to the whole tendency of his doctrine and to the openly announced principle, that pleasure controls the attention and governs all our actions. He has just as little intention of doubting the existence of God. All is dependent on God. He is our lawgiver; it is in virtue of his wisdom that from small beginnings — perception and need — the most splendid results, science and morality, are developed under the hands of man. Whoever undertakes to complain that He has concealed from us the nature of things and granted us to know relations alone, forgets that we need no more than this. We do not exist in order to know ; to live is to enjoy. The theme of the Treatise on the Sensations, 1754, is: Memory, comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition) are nothing but different forms of atten- tion ; similarly the emotions, the appetites, and the will, noth- ing but modifications of desire; while both alike take their origin in sensation. Sensation is the sole source and the sole content of the life of the mind as a whole. To prove these positions Condillac makes use of the fiction of a statue, in which one sense awakes after another, first the lowest of the senses, smell, and last the most valuable, the sense of touch, which compels us (by its perception of density or resistance) to project our sensations, and thus wakes in us the idea ot an external world. In themselves sensations are merely subjective states, modes of our own being; without the sense of touch we would ascribe odor, sound,