from the
charge of borrowing. Condillac's book was published three years (1754)
after the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, and he afterwards wrote a
pamphlet defending himself from the charge of having taken the fancy of
his Statue from Diderot; nor, for that matter, did Diderot ever make
sign or claim in the matter. We have already spoken of the relations
between the two philosophers, and though it is a mistake to describe
Diderot as one of Condillac's most celebrated pupils,[77] yet there is
just as little reason to invert the connection, or to doubt Condillac's
own assertion that the Statue was suggested to him by Mademoiselle
Ferrand, that remarkable woman to whose stimulating and directing
influence he always professed such deep obligation. Attention has been
called to the fact that in 1671 a Parisian bookseller published a Latin
version of a much more intelligent and scientific fancy than the
Statue--the _Philosophus Autodidactus_ of the Arabian, Ibn Tophail. This
was a romance, in which a human being is suckled by a gazelle on a
desert island in the tropics, and grows up in the manner of some
Robinson Crusoe with a turn for psychological speculation, and gradually
becomes conscious, through observation, of the peculiar properties
belonging to his senses.[78]

Of the part of the Letter that concerns gesture, one can only say that
it appears astonishingly crude to those who know the progress that has
been made since Diderot's time in collecting and generalising the
curious groups of fact connected with gesture-language. We can imagine
the eager interest that Diderot would have had in such curious
observations as that gesture-language has something like a definite
syntax; that it furnishes no means of distinguishing causation from
sequence or simultaneity; that savages can understand and be understood
with ease and certainty in a deaf-and-dumb school.[79] Diderot was acute
enough to see that the questions of language could only be solved, not
by the old metaphysical methods, but experientially. For the
experiential method in this matter the time was not ripe. It was no
wonder, then, that after a few pages, he broke away and hastened to
aesthetics.

III.

Penalties on the publication of heretical opinion did not cease in
England with the disappearance of the Licensing Act. But they were at
least inflicted by law. It was the Court of King's Bench which, in 1730,
visited Woolston with fine and imprisonment, after al