uncultivated primitive man, is converted into the rational
and cultivated man. Let us consider life at the outset, the animal at
the lowest degree on the scale, the human being as soon as it is born.
The first thing we find is perception, agreeable or disagreeable, and
next a want, propensity or desire, and therefore at last, by means of
a physiological mechanism, voluntary or involuntary movements, more or
less accurate and more or less appropriate and coordinated. And this
elementary fact is not merely primitive; it is, again, constant and
universal, since we encounter it at each moment of each life, and in
the most complicated as well as in the simplest. Let us accordingly
ascertain whether it is not the thread with which all our mental cloth
is woven, and whether its spontaneous unfolding, and the knotting of
mesh after mesh, is not finally to produce the entire network of our
thought and passion.--Condillac (1715-1780)provides us here with
an incomparable clarity and precision with the answers to all our
questions, which, however the revival of theological prejudice and
German metaphysics was to bring into discredit in the beginning of the
nineteenth century, but which fresh observation, the establishment
of mental pathology, and dissection have now (in 1875) brought back,
justified and completed.[3123] Locke had already stated that our ideas
all originate in outward or inward experience. Condillac shows further
that the actual elements of perception, memory, idea, imagination,
judgment, reasoning, knowledge are sensations, properly so called,
or revived sensations; our loftiest ideas are derived from no other
material, for they can be reduced to signs which are themselves
sensations of a certain kind. Sensations accordingly form the substance
of human or of animal intelligence; but the former infinitely surpasses
the latter in this, that, through the creation of signs, it succeeds in
isolating, abstracting and noting fragments of sensations, that is to
say, in forming, combining and employing general conceptions.--This
being granted, we are able to verify all our ideas, for, through
reflection, we can revive and reconstruct the ideas we had formed
without any reflection. No abstract definitions exist at the outset;
abstraction is ulterior and derivative; foremost in each science must
be placed examples, experiences, evident facts; from these we derive our
general idea. In the same way we derive from several general