CONDILLAC, ETIENNE BONNOT de. — Philosopher and educationalist, born in Grenoble on 30 September 1715, died at Flux in 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 the French Academy (1768), a follower of Locke, a clear though superficial expositor, he exercised philosophical hegemony over the culture of his time for half a century, until he was displaced by French traditionalism and German philosophical Romanticism. He made himself known through his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), and even more through the Traité des systèmes (1749). More original, but received with distrust by Diderot himself and by Buffon, were the two Traité des sensations and Traité des animaux (1754). From 1769 to 1773 he published, in 13 volumes, the Cours d'étude, which he had given to the Infante Ferdi-
COURS D'ÉTUDE
POUR L'INSTRUCTION
DU PRINCE DE PARME,
AU JOUR D'AUJOURD'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.
(photo Enc. Catt.)
CONDILLAC, ETIENNE - Cours d'étude, Lausanne 1780.
Rome, copy in the National Library.
... of Parma, of whom he had been tutor. The Cours comprises grammar, the art of writing, reasoning, and thinking, and the general history of men and empires (placed on the Index by decree of 22 September 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).
The philosophical thought of C. accentuates Lockean sensationalism: but, whereas Locke had examined the various facts of consciousness, all placed together on a single plane, C. derives all the faculties of the soul from sensation, which is always accompanied by pleasure or pain: ideas, understood as the simple recollection of sensations; memory, judgment, reflection, passions, desires, and the will itself. The senses do not perceive external objects, but rather the modifications of the subject. His famous statue, which is first given the sense of smell and then, successively, the other senses, when it smells, tastes, hears, and sees, believes itself to be entirely smell, taste, sound, and light—that is, the objects themselves of knowledge.
The driving force of all human development is need, and its means is the association of ideas: everything is sensation or transformation of sensation. It would therefore seem that every spiritual value is precluded to man. Nevertheless, C., with strange inconsistency, proves the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, freedom, morality, and natural religion, which is elevated by supernatural religion.
C.'s pedagogical ideas, scattered here and there throughout his works, are set forth chiefly in the Piano d'educazione, translated by Muratori. The principal points are these: not to begin with abstract and general ideas (as was customary at the time), but to lead the pupil along the path of personal observation, retracing the course followed over the centuries by humanity in reaching its present degree of culture. But is this path not endless? It is shortened by instructing the pupil in the functioning of the senses; because, according to C., once he has understood this,
the pupil will feel a great desire to use them: thus he will quickly complete the journey that humanity took so many centuries to traverse. C.'s pedagogy is not humanistic but intellectualistic. Some of his ideas are original, many are good and part of the common heritage of culture, in disagreement with his epistemological-metaphysical system, which would lead to an absolute sensationalist subjectivism.