The Geometric Spirit. The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment by Isabel F. Knight (review)

780 BOOK REVIEWS sion of witnesses is well introduced and a perspective of caution maintained. Part I brings the reader from Clement of Alexandria up to Gemistos Plethon, and the compiler has written generous pages of orientation to his forty-odd authors. The matter is broken down into four chapters treating: the question of Greek rationalism and the possibility of a religious undertone , as we understand it, in that thought; the noisy advent of followers of Jesus into the intellectual stoa and the various attempts to synthesize faith with the evidence of reason. Since this discussion is too often carried on solely in terms of Augustine's view, it is refreshing to find appreciation for what Damascene, Michael Psellos and Origen have contributed to the effort. Part II is devoted to some thirteen " historical " approaches to the faith and reason question. In line with the definition given history by the general editor, the discussion here ranges into economic and social themes with Troeltsch, Gibbon and Toynbee represented. The same sense of balance and variety is had here as in Part 1: Nietzsche speaks and Peguy responds. If we are to take seriously Lord Acton's admonition to study problems in preference to periods-and the limitations of the lecture system still in vogue makes this an imperative-then Shiel's work offers hope that an historical approach can be combined with incisive commentary to the detriment of neither. Documentation is complete and so also is the index. While biographical data is supplied, one might have hoped for a larger bibliography. The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pa. JoHN B. DAVIs, 0. P. The Geometric Spirit. The Abbe de Condillac and the French Enlightenment . By IsABEL F. KNIGHT. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968. Pp. 321. $10.00. While the Abbe de Condillac can scarcely be regarded as a major philosopher -or even a very important popularizer, as the often-reprinted Voltaire, for instance-a careful study of his works can provide a fascinating example of one way eighteenth-century, officially Christian Europe attempted to preserve the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Locke while maintaining at least the forms of religious orthodoxy. According to the Condillac family's oral tradition, the abbe was always careful to do and say the things orthodoxy required of him. A priest as a result of family pressures, he is said to have offered Mass only once, on the occ~tsion of his ordjp.ation; neverthelest; he was careful to wear always BOOK REVIEWS 781 the prescribed cassock, he assisted at Mass regularly in his private chapel, and professed at the end of his life that he died in the Catholic faith. Condillac's primary interest, however, seems to have been that of a bloodless sort of philosophe; that is, a man intensely interested in understanding the workings of a sensibly perceived universe he assumed to be wholly rational, but a man devoid of any zeal to change political, social, or religious structures. As Miss Knight sees the relationship betwen Condillac's religious orthodoxy and his philosophical enterprise: Perhaps the most striking thing about Condillac's religious references is their irrelevance to everything else in his philosophy.... They make no difference to his system, which would be the same without them. . . . Whether he really believed in the Christian revelation, or whether it was a mere convention which he dared not openly reject, is probably impossible to ascertain, but some tentative suggestions may be made. I think it more likely than not that he really accepted, with little passion and with some mental reservations, the Catholic position and simply kept it isolated from his philosophy, with which it was not compatible.... How he did it, by what intellectual or psychological machinery he managed not to let his left hand know what his right hand was doing, may be explained by two elements in his makeup: his conventional and retiring spirit, and his formalistic, unemotional temperament. Controversy and rebellion were deeply threatening to Condillac. Miss Knight, however, reveals in her speculation concerning Condillac's reconciliation of religious orthodoxy and philosophical innovation, a certain simplistic approach to "Catholic theology," as she calls it: His empiricism...