The Divine Lamp

Article 4

Defectiveness of Condillac’s analysis.

72. In reading attentively this author, we see a man who evidently means to explain the successive development of the human faculties by that strict analytical process which does not allow of a single arbitrary admission, and who is, moreover, persuaded of his ability to succeed better than any of his predecessors in the same field of investigation. But we see, at the same time, that in his hands the art of conducting a reasoning with the rigorous consecutiveness is as yet in its infancy. By following up his steps with the same intention of being exact, and with the art, improved nowadays, of closely observing everything, and admitting nothing without good proof being shown for it, we discover that his analysis of the operations of the soul is done very imperfectly, and that he sometimes introduces and sometimes supposes the most relevant facts without giving any explanation of them, without having distinctly observed them, or at least without perceiving that they require explanation.

As proof of this, and to make it clear that Condillac did not so much as see the difficulty there is in accounting for the act of judgment without presupposing something innate in our minds, I will let the reader judge for himself how loose and how little ingenious is the way in which he reduces all the faculties of the soul to sensation alone.

Article 5

Intellectual attention is not the same as sensitivity.

73. Condillac, in the first place, endeavors to reduce attention to sensation as follows: If a man has a great number of sensations simultaneously, with more or less the same degree of intensity, he is still merely an animal that feels. However, if we discard all but one sensation, or, without removing the others, reduce their power, the spirit is immediately seized more particularly by the sensation, which retains all its intensity. This sensation is transformed into attention without the need to assume anything else in the mind.” Estrait raisonne du Traite des Sensations, p. 12; Paris, 1821)

But surely it was not difficult to see that the action of external things on our sensitive organs, as well as the sensation which accompanies it, is different from that activity which the intelligent spirit puts forth in thinking of that sensation.

74. A sensation may be received by us quite independently of any action of our will. All that is required for it is that we be passively in a fit condition to receive it. On the contrary, the attention given to a sensation is, not a mere passivity, but an activity subject to our will.

Suppose we were to receive simultaneously four sensations, and that owing to our remaining in a passive or, to speak more accurately, inert attitude, all these sensations had for us much the same degree of vividness. Now, suppose that, instead of continuing in that state of indifference, we concentrated our attention as much as possible on one out of the four: it is certain that the sensation thus specially adverted to would be more vividly perceived by us, although perhaps not so vividly as to cause the others to pass totally unnoticed.

There is in us, therefore, besides the passivity of sense, a voluntary activity-a force through which we can, among several sensations of equal strength, select one for special attention, and thus increase the strength of its impression on us. Does not this observation show that the force by which we voluntarily reflect on our sensation, and on one in preference to another, is quite a different thing from sensations themselves, which exist even without that force being set in motion at all?

A good case in point may be had in a musical quartette. If you listen in a quiet, passive way, you will take in the harmony and have all the sensations which are produced in you by the four instruments together. but experience will very soon convince you that you have also an activity quite different from this passive way of listening, and of which you can dispose at pleasure, either by attending more intensely to the whole harmony, or for taking special delight in the modulations of one particular instrument, or perhaps for admiring the skill of the performer. The sensation, therefore, belongs to the passive faculty, for the exercise of which the soul needs not to have any particular and, as it were, self-moving activity; whereas attention belongs to an active faculty, whose use is often determined by our free-will. In this sense it is true that, with sensation alone, man ‘is as yet no better that an animal that feels.’ But man is never with sensation alone. Besides the power of feeling he has always (whether he actually uses it or not) the power of turning his intellectual activity upon one rather than another of the things he feels; and this latter power from the very first moments of his existence divides him from and places him essentially above the brute. Excerpted from THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS by Blessed Antonio Rosmini. The work is in the public domain.)

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