Record #140
Condillac Sensitive Statue
A philosophical statue that gradually acquires consciousness through sensation.
Original Text
The mystery of the origin of ideas brings a pair of strange creatures to imaginary zoology. One was evolved towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the other a hundred years later.
The first is Condillac’s sensitive statue. Descartes professed the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas; Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for the purposes of refuting him, conceived a marble statue in the likeness of the human body and inhabited by a soul that had never perceived or thought. Condillac begins by conferring on his statue a single sense, perhaps the least complex of all - that of smell. A whiff of jasmine is the start of the statue’s biography; for one moment there is nothing but this odour in the whole universe - or, to be more accurate, this odour is the universe, which a moment later will be the odour of a rose, then of a carnation. In the statue’s consciousness, once there is a single odour we have attention; once an odour lasts after the stimulus has ceased we have memory; once a present and a past impression occupy the statue’s attention we have the ability to compare; once the statue perceives likeness and unlikeness we have judgement; once the ability to compare and judgement occur a second time we have reflection; once a pleasant memory is more vivid than an unpleasant impression we have imagination. Once the faculty of understanding is born, the faculty of the will will be born: love and hate (attraction and repulsion), hope and fear. The consciousness of having passed through many states of mind will give the statue the abstract notion of numbers; the consciousness of being the odour of carnation and of having been the odour of jasmine, the notion of the I.
The author will then endow his hypothetical man with hearing, taste, sight, and finally, touch. This last sense will reveal to him that space exists and that in space he exists in a body; sounds, smells, and colours had been to him, before this stage, mere variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory just related is called Traité des sensations and dates from I7;4; for this summary we have made use of the second volume of Bréhier’s Histoiredelaphilosophie.
The first is Condillac’s sensitive statue. Descartes professed the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas; Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for the purposes of refuting him, conceived a marble statue in the likeness of the human body and inhabited by a soul that had never perceived or thought. Condillac begins by conferring on his statue a single sense, perhaps the least complex of all - that of smell. A whiff of jasmine is the start of the statue’s biography; for one moment there is nothing but this odour in the whole universe - or, to be more accurate, this odour is the universe, which a moment later will be the odour of a rose, then of a carnation. In the statue’s consciousness, once there is a single odour we have attention; once an odour lasts after the stimulus has ceased we have memory; once a present and a past impression occupy the statue’s attention we have the ability to compare; once the statue perceives likeness and unlikeness we have judgement; once the ability to compare and judgement occur a second time we have reflection; once a pleasant memory is more vivid than an unpleasant impression we have imagination. Once the faculty of understanding is born, the faculty of the will will be born: love and hate (attraction and repulsion), hope and fear. The consciousness of having passed through many states of mind will give the statue the abstract notion of numbers; the consciousness of being the odour of carnation and of having been the odour of jasmine, the notion of the I.
The author will then endow his hypothetical man with hearing, taste, sight, and finally, touch. This last sense will reveal to him that space exists and that in space he exists in a body; sounds, smells, and colours had been to him, before this stage, mere variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory just related is called Traité des sensations and dates from I7;4; for this summary we have made use of the second volume of Bréhier’s Histoiredelaphilosophie.