or fear,-in a word, the whole phenomena of our emotional nature.' Finally, the will itself, with all its mighty energies, is shown to be like the intellect, nothing more than a transformed sensation.2

To illustrate this doctrine, Condillac supposes a perfectly organised human being to be created, encased in a marble covering; and then, proceeding to lift this covering, he attempts, with great ingenuity, to show how the different mental phenomena would make their appearance one after the other, as the impressions of the external world were more freely admitted, until the man becomes morally and intellectually complete. Now, in all this he has marked very beautifully the various occasions upon which his statue would require the impulses derived from the external world, in order to bring its various faculties into operation; but he forgets that these occasions might exist for ever, and be eternally prompting to action, but that no intelligence would ever result unless the faculties were at hand, and all ready constituted for reacting upon them. Condillac has, in fact, from the very first step of his analysis, in which he explains attention, substituted the occasion for the cause. No doubt our experiencing a sensation is the occasion on which we first show the phenomenon that is termed attention, but we can by no means conclude from hence that sensation is the producing cause of attention, and

1 Traité des Sensations, partie I. chap. iii.

Ibid. partie I. chap. iii. § 9.

Sen

affords all the elements of which it consists. sation is a purely passive thing; we experience it just as long as the organic impression lasts, and no longer; attention is something active and voluntary, which we can continue or suspend at pleasure; the one is a production from without, the other an energy from within; the one is necessary, the other free; the one is the action of the outward world upon the inward, the other is the reaction of the inward world upon the outward. In the very first step of his reasoning, therefore, Condillac makes a fatal oversight which vitiates all the rest, and deprives the whole superstructure of sensationalism, as he had erected it, of any solid foundation.'

The next step of his analysis is not more successful, that, namely, in which he derives the various faculties of memory, comparison, judgment, &c., from attention. When we attend to a sensation which has been, he argues, we are said to remember. But how, we ask, are we to do this? By what means is the sensation retained while others are rushing in upon us? Something more than mere attention is assuredly requisite to account for this power of retention. Again, comparison is said to be a double attention; but is the whole of what we mean by comparison comprised in the mere perception of the two things compared? Far from it. I can attend to two things without comparing them, or without being able to compare them; comparison

* For a full examination of Condillac's main positions, see Cousin's "Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophie Morale," Leçon iii.

supposes a balancing of relations, i. e. a judgment; mere perception supposes nothing of the kind. Still less is it possible to reduce the power of the will to this source-a power which, in its conscious freedom and spontaneous activity, is as unlike the passive phenomena of sensation as life differs from death. But into this discussion we must not enter; enough, we trust, has been said already just to point out the fundamental error of Condillac's philosophy, enough to show that however energetically you may pour in impressions from without, the supposed statue, though replete with life, must still remain mentally dark and inactive, until the spark of reason, and the native power of the will, begin to react upon them. To sum up, then, in few words, the influence of Condillac upon the progress of philosophy, we should say that he began a consistent disciple of Locke, and ended (in everything but drawing its last conclusions) an advocate of complete sensationalism.

Another well-known writer of the eighteenth century was Charles Bonnet (born at Geneva 1720, died there 1793) a man whose fame was only second to Condillac himself as the author of a vigorous and eloquent vindication of the sensational philosophy. His first writings were devoted to the illustration of nature, of whose beauty he had a deep perception. Rising, however, in regular gradation from nature to man, he produced his "Essai Analytique sur les Facultés de l'Ame." In this work he treads somewhat closely in the footsteps of Condillac,

using even the same illustration of the statue, and seeking to study in the same way the material that each of the senses supplies towards the formation of our ideas. In two respects, however, there is a decided difference between them. Bonnet, unlike Condillac, and much in the same manner as Hartley, employed many physiological observations to aid his mental analysis. "I have put into my book," he remarks in the preface, "a great deal of physics and very little of metaphysics; but in truth what could I say of the mind, in itself? we know it so little! Man is a mixed being; he only has ideas by the intervention of the senses; and even his most abstract notions are derived from them. It is upon his body, and by his body, that the mind acts. It is necessary, then, always to come back to physics as to the first origin of all which the mind experiences; we know no more what an idea of the mind is, than the mind itself; but we know that our ideas are attached to certain fibres; we are able, then, to reason upon these fibres because we see them; we are able thus to study a little their movements, the results of their movements, and the bonds they have among themselves." Such is the use which Bonnet proposed to make of his physiological researches in the investigation of the human mind.

In another respect, however, Bonnet far surpassed Condillac, and that is in his resistance of the theory of transformed sensations, and his recognition of the mind's activity in the phenomena of attention and volition. In this respect he returns to Locke's

stand-point, and even employs the term reflection to designate the active, in opposition to the passive phenomena of the mind. Bonnet was far from adopting the more extreme results of sensationalism; and it was apparently to prevent its tendency from being carried too far that he wrote his "Palingénésie Philosophique," in which he has advocated the immortality of the souls both of men and animals, and carried the idea of development in nature to such an extent, as to imagine that plants may become animals, animals men, and men angels.

Condillac and Bonnet left the position of speculative philosophy in France much in the same state as Hartley did in England; they all laid down the ground principles of sensationalism, but all, owing to their good sense and religious feeling, hesitated to draw the ultimate conclusions. Those conclusions, however, soon made their appearance in France to a much greater extent than they have ever done in England; so much so, indeed, that they seemed for a time entirely to absorb all other philosophy. Helvétius, Saint Lambert, and Condorcet, followed immediately in the track that had been thus pointed out, and applied the new psychological principles, which had burst with such eclàt upon society, not only to philosophy generally, but more especially to the department of ethics. First of all, Helvétius, carrying this notion of empiricism to the farthest extremity it would admit, founded upon it a moral system of undisguised selfishness. His primary position is, that man owes all his superiority over the