ishes remembered sensation from current sensation, on this account, is just that remembered sensations are of what “was.” But this is not to explain how we could get the idea that a sensation is of what was as opposed to what is.
Similar difficulties arise in connection with the will. In the Essay, Condillac supposed that the imagination is initially outside of our control. Unless driven by need to conceive the means of achieving an end, we imagine what we do only because in the course of experience we sense accidental or natural signs that suggest particular ideas to us. The use of instituted signs is supposed to change this circumstance and give us a new ability to control our thoughts (Essay I.ii.4.§§45–46). But it is not clear why this should be the case (note, in this regard, the apparent contradiction between Essay I.ii.4. §39 and §46). Just because a being has acquired the ability to produce signs in order to induce thought, it does not follow that this ability must be under the subject's voluntary control, and if the production of instituted signs is outside of our control, it is not clear how their use can give us a power to control our thoughts.
The “sensationist” label notwithstanding, there is some suggestion that Condillac may have taken both memory and volition to be primitive functions of the soul that are not in fact reducible to sensation. In the Essay he described our awareness of the temporal sequence of our perceptions as a “fundamental experience (première expérience)” (Essay I.ii.1. §15) and in the Dissertation on Liberty (§§9–10) he seems to have taken freedom of choice and the ability to spontaneously direct attention to be original abilities that the soul has whenever it is not impelled by some pressing need.
These views of memory and will are not necessarily inconsistent with Condillac's sensationism, his repeated claims to derive all the mind's capacities from the operation of sensation notwithstanding. There are stronger and weaker ways of understanding Condillac's sensationism. On the stronger understanding, Condillac meant to say that sensation produces all of the other capacities of the soul. On the weaker understanding, he only meant to say that sensation instructs us in the proper employment of our capacities. The weaker reading is compatible with allowing original, irreducible powers of memory and free choice, provided that we take those powers to be ones that we do not at first know how to effectively direct or employ. The stronger reading attributes an absolutely rigorous empiricism to Condillac — one that does not admit that the mind is endowed with any innate abilities. It is not clear what Condillac would have had to gain by insisting on such a rigorous empiricism. Locke's rejection of innate ideas and innate principles was bound up with a reaction to unquestioned authority and a demand that all knowledge claims be demonstrable by appeal to common experience. But allowing that we possess innate cognitive capacities and innate conative abilities does not interfere with this demand, particularly if we stress, as the weak reading does, that we need to learn how to employ these capacities and abilities, and that experience serves as our best and only true teacher. The pedagogical and methodological conclusions that Condillac most wanted to draw still follow from that qualification, without having to invoke the strong reading.
- Lettres inédites à Gabriel Cramer, Georges Le Roy (ed.), Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1953.
- Les Monades, Bongie, Laurence (ed.), in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 187, 1980.
- Oeuvres philosophiques, Georges Le Roy (ed.), 3 volumes,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–1951.
- Volume I (1947) contains the Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines, Traité des Systêmes, Traité des Sensations, “Dissertation sur la liberté,” “Réponse a un reproche qui m'a été fait sur le project exécuté dans le Traité des Sensations,” “Extrait raisonné du traité des sensations,” Traité des Animaux, “Lettre de monsieur l'abbé de Condillac à l