Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/277

Rh in a field which has since yielded a rich and abundant harvest.  CONDER,, an English litterateur, was born in Falcon Street, Aldersgate, London, on 17th September 1789, and belonged to an old nonconformist family, proud of its hereditary piety and nonconformity, Leaving school at the age of thirteen, he began to assist his father in his business as a bookseller at Bucklersbury ; and in this situation he found abundant pabulum for the literary tastes which he had already begun to develop. The first time he appeared in print was in the poet s corner of the Athenceum, No. 11 ; and in 1810 he joined the well-known Taylor family in the little volume called the Associate Minstrels. From 1811, when his father retired, till 1819, he carried on the business on his own account ; but in the latter year he determined to adopt literature as a profession, and thenceforward till his death his pen was never idle. As editor of the Eclectic Review, which had been published under his name since 1814, he was regarded as the literary representative of evangelical nonconformity; and in 1832 he became still more publicly and completely associated with the interests of the party as the editor of the newly established organ called the Patriot. Besides contributing voluminously to both these periodicals, he published work after work on religious, political, and miscellaneous subjects ; but in too many cases these owed their origin merely to the necessity of producing something that had a market value. That he frequently put forth mere paste and scissors work he makes no shame to confess, conscious that if his labour was somewhat ignoble it was at least performed with scrupulous honesty. His whole literary activity was influenced by his religious convictions, and it was not only as editor of the Eclectic that he endeavoured to &quot; reconcile those long divorced parties religion and literature.&quot; His most popular work was his Modern Traveller, a series of thirty volumes descriptive of the various countries of the globe ; but he will probably be longest remembered as the author of a few hymns not unworthy to rank with the best examples of nonconformist psalmody. He died on December 27, 1 855. His life has been written by his son, Eustace R. Conder.

1em  CONDILLAC, (1715-1780), Abbe de Mureaux, a distinguished writer in logic, psychology, and economic science, was born at Grenoble. Very little is known about the particulars of his life. He was the younger brother of the Abbe de Mably, and associated in his youth with Rousseau, Diderot, Duclos, and other philosophers, but afterwards allowed the intimacy to die out. He was of a serious and dignified character, and devoted himself to a life of laborious study. Like Comte and Mill, he acknowledges himself to have been largely indebted to a lady for his philosophical inspiration. While still young he was appointed preceptor to the duke of Parma, grandson of Louis XV., for whose instruction a large number of his works were composed. He was chosen by the French Academy of Sciences to succeed the Abb6 d Olivet in 1768, but after delivering a discourse on that occasion he never again appeared at the meetings. He lived in retirement on his estate of Flux, near Beaugency, till his death on 3d August 1780. Condillac s philosophical opinions are contained mainly in L Ong/ne des Connaissances Humaines, Traite des Systemes, Traite des Sensations, Grammaire, L Art d Ecrire, L Art de Raisonner, L Art de Penser, La Logique, and Jus posthumous work, La Larque des Calculs. The first of these was his earliest production, and may be regarded as. the preliminary sketch of his entire system. It touches more or less distinctly on all the topics which are discussed in the others. But the doctrines it contains receive a fuller and more mature statement elsewhere, and there are many important departures from them in the later works. Condillac s philosophical writings may be studied from three points of view. Like Locke, he begins with a polemic against innate ideas and abstract systems. This takes up a large part of the Essai sur VOrigine and almost the whole of the Traite des Systemes. In the Logique and the Art de Raisonner he expounds and illustrates the analytic method, which he regards as the only true method of science, and which is further illustrated in La Lang ue des Calculs. L Art de Penser consists largely of quotations from the Essai sur I Oriyine. In the Traite des Sensations, Condillac applies his analytic method to the solution of the psychological problem of the origin of our ideas and the formation of the mental faculties. It cannot be said that he strictly confines himself to the questions here assigned to his different works. His inveterate antipathy to innate ideas and abstract systems, his favour for analysis, and his peculiar psychological doctrines appear more or less in them all. Condillac s main attacks are directed against the innate ideas of Descartes, Malebranche s theory of the mental faculties, the monadology of Leibnitz, and the first part of Spinoza s Ethik. He thinks that innate ideas were assumed because men had not sagacity and penetration enough to go back to the origin of ideas and trace their genesis, and he finds the consequences of the system to be the multiplication of abstract principles, and a pretence of accounting for everything by the use of abstract terms. Malebranche is justly censured for giving comparisons instead of reasons in his explanation of understanding and will. In criticizing the monadology of Leibnitz, Con dillac exaggerates the vagueness and inadequacy of the ideas furnished by the reason, and the clearness of those of the senses. He cannot comprehend how each monad represents the universe in virtue of its relations to it. But may there not be a sense in which the ultimate particular in the infinitude of its relations is a mirror of the universe 1 Condillac regarded Spinozism as the best example of an abstract system, and criticized in detail the first part of the Ethik, in order to show that Spinoza failed both as to clearness of ideas and precision in the use of signs two essential conditions of the geometrical method which he adopted. Condillac divides the various philoso phical systems into three classes : (1) abstract systems which rest only on abstract principles ; (2) hypotheses, or systems grounded on mere suppositions; (3) one true system, that of Locke, which is evolved from the facts of experience. The first he treats with unmitigated scorn ; the second ho admits under limitations ; the third alone he regards as the true method of philosophy. An act of reasoning, according to Condillac, consists in detecting a judgment which is implicitly contained in another. Sometimes, to go from the known to the unknown, it is necessary to pass through a series of inter mediate judgments, each of which is contained in the one preceding. For example, the judgment that mercury will rise to a certain height in the barometer is contained implicitly in the judgment that air has weight; but we require a series of intermediate judgments to see that the former is a con sequence of the latter. The evidential force of a reasoning thus consists in the identity between the judgments of which it consists. They are the same ; only the expression changes. Such a principle could not be made to cover all the varieties of reasoning. Accordingly Condillac tries to 