TRACY, ANTOINE LOUIS CLAUDE DESTUTT, COMTE DE (1754-1836), French philosopher, son of a distin guished soldier, was born in Bourbonnais on July 20, 1754. He belonged to a noble family of Scotch descent, settled in France in the 15th century. He studied at Strasbourg, entered the army, and when the Revolution broke took an active part in the provin cial assembly of Bourbonnais. He was elected a deputy of the nobility to the states-general, where he sat with his friend La Fayette. In the spring of 1792 he received the rank of marechal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north; but when the Left became predominant took indefinite leave. He settled at Auteuil, where, with Condorcet and Cabanis, he devoted himself to scientific studies. Under the Terror he was imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Condillac and Locke, and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy. As an associate of the Institute he wrote the papers which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work on ideology. The so ciety of "ideologists" at Auteuil embraced, besides Cabanis and Tracy, Volney and Garat professor in the National Institute. Destutt de Tracy died in Paris on March 9, 1836.
Destutt de Tracy was the last eminent representative of the sensualist school which Condillac (q.v.) founded in France upon a one-sided interpretation of Locke. He pushed the sensualist
principles of Condillac to their last consequences, being in full agreement with the materialistic views of Cabanis, though the attention of the latter was devoted more to the physiological, that of Tracy to the psychological or "ideological" side of man. His ideology, he frankly stated, formed "a part of zoology," or, as we should say, of biology. The four faculties into which he divides the conscious life—perception, memory, judgment, will —are all varieties of sensation. As a psychologist de Tracy de serves credit for his distinction between active and passive touch, which developed into the theory of the muscular sense. His ac count of the notion of external existence, as derived, not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, may be compared with the account of Bain and later psychologists. His chief works are Elements d'ide ologie (1801-15; 2nd ed., 1824-25) ; Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois de Montesquieu (18o6; 5th ed., 1828; Eng. trans., Presi dent Jefferson i) ; Essai sur le genie et les ouvrages de tesquieu (i8o8).
See F. Picavet, Les Ideologues chs. v. and vi. (1891) ; V. Stepanowa, Destutt de Tracy, eine historische psychologische studie (Zurich, 1908).