CONDILLAC, ÉTIENNE BONNOT DE. - Philosopher and educationist, b. at Grenoble on 30 Sept. 1715, d. at Flux in the Orléanais in 1780. He was ordained a priest in Paris. A friend of Rousseau, Duclos and Diderot, a member of the Academy of Berlin (1752) and of that of France (1768), a follower of Locke, a clear though superficial popularizer, he exercised for half a century a philosophical hegemony over the culture of his time until he was dethroned by French traditionalism and German philosophical Romanticism. He became known through his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and more so through the Traité des systèmes (1749). More original, but received with distrust by Diderot himself and by Buffon, were the two works Traité des sensations and Traité des animaux (1754). From 1769 to 1773 he published in 13 vols. the Cours d'étude, delivered to the infante Ferdi-
COURS D'ÉTUDE
POUR L'INSTRUCTION
DU PRINCE DE PARME,
AU JOUR D'HUI
S. A. R. L'INFANT
D. FERDINAND,
DUC DE PARME, PLAISANCE,
GUASTALLE, &c. &c. &c.
Par M. l'Abbé de CONDILLAC, de l'Académie
Françoise & de celles de Berlin, de Parme & de
Lyon; ancien Précepteur de S. A. R.
TOME PREMIER.
A LAUSANNE,
Chez GABRIEL DECOMBAZ,
Libraire.
M. DCC. LXXX.
(phot. Enc. Catt.)
CONDILLAC, ETIENNE - Cours d'étude, Lausanne 1780.
Rome, copy in the Biblioteca Nazionale.
Ferdinand of Parma, whose tutor he had been. The Cours comprises grammar, the art of writing, of reasoning and of thinking, and the general history of men and of empires (placed on the Index by decree of 22 Sept. 1836). In 1776 he published: Le commerce et le gouvernement considéré relativement l'un à l'autre; posthumously, La logique (1780) and La langue des calculs (1798).
Condillac's philosophical thought accentuates Lockean sensationalism: but whereas Locke had examined the various facts of consciousness all placed together on a single plane, Condillac derives from sensation, always accompanied by pleasure or pain, all the faculties of the soul: ideas, understood as the simple recollection of sensations; memory, judgment, reflection, the passions, desires and the will itself. The senses do not perceive external objects, but the modifications of the subject. His famous statue, to which smell is given first, then, one by one, the other senses, when it smells, tastes, hears and sees, believes itself to be wholly odor, taste, sound, light — that is, the very objects of knowledge.
The mainspring of all human development is need, its means the association of ideas: everything is sensation or a transformation of sensation. It would therefore seem that every spiritual value is precluded to man. Nevertheless Condillac, with strange inconsistency, proves the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, freedom, morality and natural religion, which is raised by supernatural religion.
Condillac's pedagogical ideas, scattered here and there throughout his works, are set out principally in the Piano d'educazione, translated by Muratori. Salient points: not to begin from abstract and general ideas (according to the custom of the time), but to lead the pupil along the path of personal observation, retracing the course followed over the centuries by humanity to reach its present degree of culture. But is this path not infinite? It is shortened by instructing the pupil in the functioning of the senses; because, according to Condillac, once this is understood, the pupil will feel a great desire to use them: thus he will swiftly complete the journey which humanity took so many centuries to traverse. Condillac's pedagogy is not humanistic but intellectualistic. Some of his ideas are original, many are good, the common patrimony of culture, in disagreement with his gnoseological-metaphysical system, which would lead to an absolute sensationalist subjectivism.