Condillac's opinion of the importance of words is much more akin to Berkeley's views. Without words he contends we should have had no abstract ideas (in the Locke language); that we can only think of a particular image, and our thinking of any general idea, as man, is an absurdity ; that having obabrved something in common to several individuals, as Peter, &c., we agree to call them all by the term man, and that the general idea is nothing but an idea of such term, or an acknowledgment that the term may fit each of the individuals equally well. Something very like this may be found in Berkeley's Introduction to his ' Treatise concerning the principles of Human Knowledge.' The knowledge of our own and of other bodies, according to Condillac, commences with the sensation of tench. He gives his statue that sensation, and making it strike itself with its hand, states that while this hand as it were, says, on the consciousness of a sensation, C'est moi' (It is I), the part touched echoes the declara tion : thus the statue concludes that both parts belong to its individual self, in other words, that it has a corporeal body. On the other hand, if the statue touch an extraneous body, though the hand says C'est moi,' it perceives there is no echoing sensation, and therefore concludes there is another body besides its own.
Condillao has been much lauded for his ingenious views of the progress of language. He begins with the language of action, and in the absence of abstract ideas among some American tribes, who have scarcely any language but that of cries and gestures, he finds a support for his hypothesis that these ideas depend on words. The language of action, he says, preceded that of words, and this latter language still preserved much of the character of its predecessor. Thus the
elevation and depression of the voice succeeded the various move ments of the body. Variation of accent was so much the more neces sary as the rude people, who were beginning to lay aside their language of gesture, found it easier to express their meaning by changing emphasis than inventing words. This emphatic style of speaking is in itself a sort of prosody, which insensibly leads to music, and the accompanying of these sounds by gestures leads to dancing, all of which the Greeks .called by the common name aoucuch, music. He then proceeds to trace the drama, rhetoric, and even the peculiarity of the Greek language by regular steps, the language of action having formed the basis of alL On the whole, the philosophy of Condillac is a system of ultra sensualism ; by omitting reflection (in Locke's sense of the term, that is, Condillac himself employs the word reflection, but signifies by it nothing more than the looking back on past impressions), be makes the mind perceive nothing but sensations, itself being to itself nothing but a combination of sensations, and thus turn which way we will, there is no escape from the world of sense.
The fullest account of Condillac's philosophy for those who do not wisl- to peruse his voluminous works, will be found in La Harpe's Coors de Is Litterature :' a short account of the influence of Locke on France through his medium is given in Professor Stewart's 'Philo sophical Essays;' but those who wish to hear Condillac himself without much trouble, will find his system most fully aril pleasingly developed in the Traits des Sensations.'