in fact the good and
bad points that we might expect to find in a sensationist who knows no
science but mathematics. He rejects the medieval apparatus of the
syllogism; but is precluded by his standpoint from understanding the
active, spiritual character of thought; nor had he that interest in
natural science and appreciation of inductive reasoning which form the
chief merit of J. S. Mill. It is obvious enough that Condillac's
anti-spiritual psychology, with its explanation of personality as an
aggregate of sensations, leads straight to atheism and determinism.
There is, however, no reason to question the sincerity with which he
repudiates both these consequences. What he says upon religion is always
in harmony with his profession; and he vindicated the freedom of the
will in a dissertation that has very little in common with the _Traite
des sensations_ to which it is appended. The common reproach of
materialism should certainly not be made against him. He always asserts
the substantive reality of the soul; and in the opening words of his
_Essai_, "Whether we rise to heaven, or descend to the abyss, we never
get outside ourselves--it is always our own thoughts that we perceive,"
we have the subjectivist principle that forms the starting-point of
Berkeley.

As was fitting to a disciple of Locke, Condillac's ideas have had most
importance in their effect upon English thought. In matters connected
with the association of ideas, the supremacy of pleasure and pain, and
the general explanation of all mental contents as sensations or
transformed sensations, his influence can be traced upon the Mills and
upon Bain and Herbert Spencer. And, apart from any definite
propositions, Condillac did a notable work in the direction of making
psychology a science; it is a great step from the desultory, genial
observation of Locke to the rigorous analysis of Condillac,
short-sighted and defective as that analysis may seem to us in the light
of fuller knowledge. His method, however, of imaginative reconstruction
was by no means suited to English ways of thinking. In spite of his
protests against abstraction, hypothesis and synthesis, his allegory of
the statue is in the highest degree abstract, hypothetical and
synthetic. James Mill, who stood more by the study of concrete
realities, put Condillac into the hands of his youthful son with the
warning that here was an example of what to avoid in the method of
psychology. In France Condillac's