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 216 CONDILLAC CONDOM paper in the dissenting interest, which he con- ducted until his death. Among his works are "Protestant Nonconformity " (2 vols.), "The Star in the East," a poem, and " An Analytical and Comparative View of all Keligions." CONDILLAC, Etienne Bonnot de, a French philos- opher, born at Grenoble, Sept. 30, 1715, died Aug. 3, 1780. ' In early youth his constitution was so feeble that he could not be kept at school; at 12 years of age he was not able to read. After having improved in health, he de- voted himself to science, and became the tutor of the heir apparent of Parma, a nephew of Louis XV. Having completed the prince's edu- cation, he returned to Paris, and subsequently retired to an estate near Beaugency, where he spent the rest of his life. He was a quiet, un- pretending scholar. In his philosophy he start- ed from the ideas of Gassendi and Hobbes, and from the psychological researches of Locke, but enlarged and modified them to such a de- gree that his claims to originality -have not been seriously contested. His theories were highly esteemed for their clearness and sim- plicity, and were widely propagated by the en- cyclopaedists. In his Essai sur Vorigine des connaissances Tiumaines (Amsterdam, 1746), he maintained the following propositions: 1. All our ideas originate in sensations; there are no innate ideas. 2. Not only our ideas but all faculties of the human soul proceed from trans- formed sensations ; the intellectual faculties (at- tention, comparison, judgment, reflection, im- agination, and the reasoning power) from sen- sations so far as they represent external ob- jects; the faculties of volition (need, desire, passion, and resolution) from sensations so far as they affect the subject. 3. The intellectual action consists merely in the connection and combination of ideas. 4. Left to itself, unaid- ed by the senses, the human mind is void and powerless. Whatever progress it has made is owing to the use of signs and articulated sounds. Thinking is nothing without language. Languages are analytical methods. To them we owe most of our ideas, which have no re- ality except by the words or signs representing them. 5. In reasoning, proof is afforded by identity. The demonstration of such identity is facilitated by the close analogy of words. Hence science is not much more than language, and a correct science depends upon a correct language, adapted as closely as possible to the different modifications and gradations of per- ception. 6. The only method leading to the knowledge of truth is the analytic one, the close and logical observation of all parts of an object, so that the mind may comprehend them simultaneously, and understand their common principle. Synthesis, beginning with definitions and abstract generalities, is useless, since it generates chimeras and errors. Con- dillac, although reducing all the faculties of the soul to mere transformations of sensation, does not belong to the materialist school prop- er. Unlike La Mettrie and his followers, he does not consider sensation as a mere physical process, and assumes the immaterial nature of the soul. In his Traite des systemes (1749) he endeavored to show that all metaphysical sys- tems are based upon arbitrary assumptions, shallow quibbles, or empty abstractions. The "innate ideas" of Descartes, the "ideas of God" of Malebranche, the "monads" of Leib- nitz, the "infinite substance" of Spinoza, are all mercilessly dissected by Condillac, and ex- posed as chimeras. His Traite des sensations (1754) is an ingenious demonstration of the psy- chological process by which sensations are de- veloped into ideas and self-consciousness. In this book Condillac exhibits a human form as yet entirely inanimate, and then adding suc- cessively the senses, he goes on to show what kind of sensations are produced by the one and the other ; how by the repetition or combina- tion of these sensations ideas are begot ; again, how these ideas are interwoven, and new com- binations formed, every succeeding one more remote from and apparently independent of the original sensitive impressions. The idea of considering the human mind first as a tabula rasa, and then observing the action of the sen- ses upon it, was not entirely new ; it had been used before by Bonnet, Diderot, and Buffon. The original manner, therefore, in which this idea had been used by Condillac did not save him from the reproach of having mechanically imitated Buffon. To show the untruth of this, he wrote his Traite des animaux (1755), in which he refuted many of Buffon's doctrines by the very principles laid down in the Traite des sensations. While tutor of the prince of Par- ma, Condillac composed the GOUTS d'etudes, in three volumes, intended as a kind of cyclopae- dia of philosophical and historical science, but chiefly remarkable for the ingenious investiga- tion of the signs and words representing sensa- tions and ideas. Another work, Le commerce et le gouvernement consideres relativement Vun a Vautre (1776), being an application of his ana- lytic method to political and economical doc- trines, was not successful. Having been re- quested by the board of education of Poland to assist in the organization of public education in that country, Condillac wrote his Logique (published in 1781), as a manual for schools. An incomplete work, La langue des calculs, in which he had proposed to demonstrate that all sciences might be rendered as positive and exact as mathematics, was published in 1798 by Laromiguiere. Several editions of the complete works of Condillac have been published in Paris (23 vols., 1798; 32 vols., 1803 ; 16 vols., 1821). CONDOM, a town of France, in the depart- ment of Gers, on the river Bayse, which is here crossed by two bridges, 24 m. N. 1ST. W. of Auch ; pop. in 1866, 8,140. It has manufac- tories of cotton, mixed fabrics, and earthen- ware, and carries on a brisk trade with Bor- deaux in agricultural produce. There is a handsome Gothic church of the 16th century, and a communal college. It was formerly the