It may be necessary to mention, that, in these remarks on the system of the illustrious preceptor of the Prince of Parma, I allude, in particular, to his Treatise “of Sensations,” which contains his more mature opinions on the subject—not to his earlier work, on the origin of human knowledge, in which he has not ventured on so bold a simplification; or at least, has not expressed it in language so precise.
The great error of Condillac, as it appears to me, consists in supposing that, when he has shown the circumstance from which any effect results, he has shown this result to be essentially the same with the circumstance which produced it.
Certain sensations have ceased to exist, certain other feelings have immediately arisen;—these new feelings are therefore the others under another shape. Such is the secret, but very false, logic, which seems to pervade his whole doctrine on the subject.
If all that is meant were merely, that whatever may be the varying feelings of the mind, the mind itself, in all this variety, when it remembers or compares, hates or loves, is still the same substance, as that which saw, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, there could be nothing objectionable in the doctrine, but there would then certainly be nothing new in it;—and, instead of thinking either of Locke or of Condillac, we might think, at pleasure, in stating such a doctrine of any of the innumerable assertors of the spirituality of the thinking principle. Such, however, is not the meaning of the French metaphysician. He asserts this identity of substance, indeed, like the philosophers who preceded him, but he asserts still more. It is not the permanent substance of mind only which is the same. Its affections, or states, which seem, in many respects, absolutely different, are the same as those very affections, or states, from which they seem to differ—and are the same, merely because they have succeeded them; for, as I have already said, except the frequency of his affirmation, that they are the same, there is no other evidence but that of the mere succession in order of time, by which he attempts to substantiate their sameness.
The origin of this false reasoning I conceive to be the analogy of MATTER, to which his system, by reducing all the affections of mind to that class which is immediately connected with external things, must have led him to pay peculiar attention. Yet, in justice to him, I must remark, that, although a system which reduces every feeling to mere sensation, and consequently connects every feeling, in its origin, with the qualities of matter, must be favourable to materialism, and has unquestionably fostered this, in a very high degree, in the French school of metaphysics, there is no reason to consider Condillac himself as a materialist; on the contrary, his works contain many very just remarks on the errors of materialism. But still his system, as I have said, by leading him continually to our organs of sense, and to the objects which act upon them, must have rendered the phenomena of matter peculiarly apt to recur to his mind in all its speculations. Now, in matter, there can be no question as to the reality of that transmutation, which, as applied to mind, forms the chief principle of his intellectual analysis. In the chemistry of the material elements, the compounds are the very elements themselves. When any two substances, present together, vanish as it were from our view, and a third substance, whether like or unlike to either of the former, presents itself in their place, we believe this third substance, however dissimilar it may appear, to be only the coexistence of the two others; and indeed, since we have no reason to believe that any change takes place, in the number of the corpuscles of which our planet is composed, the whole series of its corpuscular changes can be only new combinations of particles that existed before.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, in its application to the material world, is in this respect philosophically accurate:
Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas
Omnia destruitis, vitiataque dentibus ævi
Paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte.