A French priest imagined a statue waking up one sense at a time
To show that all knowledge starts with the senses, the philosopher Condillac pictured a marble statue with a human mind but no experiences, then gave it one sense after another, starting with smell. From a single scent of a rose, he argued, attention, memory, judgement and even desire could grow.
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac was born in Grenoble in 1714, the youngest of three brothers in a legal family; his elders took the name Mably from one family estate, and he took Condillac from another. He was ordained at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, where his brother Gabriel also took holy orders, and was made Abbot of Mureau. Apart from a spell as royal tutor in Parma, where he wrote a 13-volume course of study for the young Duke Ferdinand, a grandson of Louis XV, he devoted his life to philosophy. He mixed with Diderot's circle and befriended Rousseau, yet his unorthodox friends never harmed his career. He joined the Academie francaise in 1768 and died at his small property near Beaugency on the Loire in 1780.
He did more than anyone to establish John Locke's ideas systematically in France, then pushed them further. Locke had traced knowledge to sensation and reflection; Condillac, in his Treatise on Sensations, argued that sensation alone was enough, with every mental faculty a transformed sensation. In the statue experiment, the first smell fills its whole consciousness, which is attention. The lingering trace of that smell is memory, and holding a rose and a remembered carnation in mind together is comparison, which already amounts to judgement. Pleasure and pain steer everything, giving rise to desire and the passions. Only touch, added later, tells the statue that an outside world exists. Man, he concluded, is nothing but what he has acquired, with no innate ideas at all.
Critics feared this led to atheism and determinism, but he rejected both, always affirmed the reality of the soul and defended free will. His logic, which equated science with a well-built language, is judged weaker than his psychology. His economics is more interesting: his book on commerce and government came out in 1776, a year it shares with Adam Smith's famous economic treatise, and argued that producers work to obtain utility, an idea largely ignored until Jevons and Menger revived it in 1871. He championed free prices set by supply and demand against France's state controls.
His influence ran into British psychology, visible in the Mills, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, and his account of how language arose anticipated Johann Gottfried Herder.
Source: Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
