A New Condillac Letter and the Genesis of the Traité des Sensations

Documents A NEW CONDILLAC LETTER AND THE GENESIS OF THE TRAITE DES SENSATIONS Students of Condillac's philosophical writings have not infrequently expressed interest in questions relating to the development of his thought from the time that his first work, the Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, was published in 1746 to the appearance of his major treatise, the Trait~ des Sensations, in 1754. Condillac, the most systematic and careful of Locke's major French disciples--the philosophes's philosopher, as he has sometimes been called--had attempted in the Essai to clear up a number of the epistemological ambiguities of his English predecessor , including Locke's rather "unempirical" acceptance of reflection as an innate and autonomous power of the mind. The charge has more than once been made that Condillac, in his own modest attempts of 1746 to improve upon his master's doctrine, fell victim himself to essentially similar difficulties. His later work, the Trait~ des Sensations, though not in fundamental contradiction with the Essai (even though there are important and explicit differences of detail relating, for example, to the initial role of language or the relationship of tactile to visual perception ), clearly represents Condillac's best attempt to elaborate, independently of the earlier Lockian methodology, a comprehensive and consistent system of sensationalist psychology. By 1754, then, the picture of Condillac's philosophical development seems fairly clear. What is not clear, however, is the extent to which Condillac's views may have shifted long before that date and even well before he was invited by Diderot in the Lettre sur les Aveugles of 1749 to rescue philosophical reason and solid common sense from the scandalous but apparently irrefutable arguments of Bishop Berkeley 's idealism. Evidence that Condillac had seriously begun to question as early as 1747 a number of the basic conclusions of the Essai may be found in his correspondence during that year with the Genevan mathematician Gabriel Cramer (1704-1752); and, five years later, we again find him indulging in a similar vein of autocriticism regarding his position on language in a letter to the Berlin academician Maupertuis. Regrettably, few of Condillac's letters from this early period seem to have survived, and it is thus all the more surprising that the illuminating exchange with Cramer that occurred during the critical transitional years from 1747 to 1750 (it was first published by Le Roy in 1953) has attracted little more than routine scholarly attention. At least one important exception is provided, however, by a brief but extremely perceptive study of the correspondence contributed in 1971 by Piero Petacco to the Italian periodical Belfagor. In his article, Petacco carefully reviews all the known letters exchanged by Condillac and Cramer. He questions at the same time and with [83] 84 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY convincing arguments the chronological order adopted by Le Roy's edition of 1953. Finally, he concludes with an intriguing comment on the last known letter in the series, one written by Cramer to Condillac, in which the famous French philosopher is invited to ponder a key question of logic and to clarify his own views on the difference between the imagination and the understanding. Noting that history is silent on what happened next, Petacco laments the fact that our knowledge of the Cramer-Condillac exchange ends at this point and that the other letters of this precious correspondence, if other letters there were, have not turned up.1 Happily for the historian of Condillac's thought, the French abb6's response to Cramer's question has now come to light2 and provides, as we shall see, in the context of the preceding debate with his Swiss colleague, a valuable indication of how his views had evolved rapidly--indeed, perhaps rather more rapidly than has so far been suspected--from the modified Lockian positions of the Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines of 1746 to the radically sensationalist stance adopted in the Trait~ des Sensations of 1754. Interestingly enough, Condillac's major twentieth-century editor, Georges Le Roy, while conceding that the Cramer-Condillac letters he had published in 1953 provided certain useful and interesting points of clarification, maintained, nevertheless , that they did not...