Etienne Bonnot de Condillac Quotes on Knowledge
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746) and Treatise on Sensations (1754) gave eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosophy its most influential systematic empiricism. The central thesis, presented in the famous thought-experiment of the marble statue progressively endowed with the five senses, is that all the apparent operations of the mind — perception, attention, memory, imagination, judgment, reasoning, and the formation of abstract ideas — can be derived from the single ground of transformed sensation through the natural operations of pleasure, pain, and the comparison of experience. The framework, developed against the residual nativist commitments of the Cartesian tradition and beyond the more cautious empiricism of Locke, shaped subsequent French philosophy through the Idéologues (Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis) and supplied the principal eighteenth-century philosophical resource for the materialist epistemology that the nineteenth century would systematize.
Quotes
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Attributed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac:
“All knowledge is transformed sensation.”
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Attributed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac:
“Language is the instrument of analysis.”
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Attributed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac:
“The whole of metaphysics rests on the analysis of ideas.”
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Attributed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac:
“Sensations alone make us what we are.”
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Attributed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac:
“A well-made science is nothing but a well-made language.”
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“It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. … If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to”
Le Commerce et le Gouvernement (1776), as quoted in Marx's Capital , Vol. I, Ch. 5. -
“The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged .”
As quoted in Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (trans. Robert Kerr, 1790), Preface, p. xiv. -
“The tone in which an Englishman expresses anger would, in Italy , be only a mark of surprise.”
As quoted in David Booth, The principles of English composition (1831), p. 8. -
“Our ideas are transformed sensations.”
As quoted in Treasury of Wisdom, Wit and Humor, Odd Comparisons and Proverbs (1878), p. 204.