the “occasions” on which the soul of itself alone exercises its sensitive activity.  Even freedom—­the supremacy of thought over the passions—­is maintained, in striking contrast to the whole tendency of his doctrine and to the openly announced principle, that pleasure controls the attention and governs all our actions.  He has just as little intention of doubting the existence of God.  All is dependent on God.  He is our lawgiver; it is in virtue of his wisdom that from small beginnings—­perception and need—­the most splendid results, science and morality, are developed under the hands of man.  Whoever undertakes to complain that He has concealed from us the nature of things and granted us to know relations alone, forgets that we need no more than this.  We do not exist in order to know; to live is to enjoy.

The theme of the Treatise on the Sensations, 1754, is:  Memory, comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition) are nothing but different forms of attention; similarly the emotions, the appetites, and the will, nothing but modifications of desire; while both alike take their origin in sensation.  Sensation is the sole source and the sole content of the life of the mind as a whole.  To prove these positions Condillac makes use of the fiction of a statue, in which one sense awakes after another, first the lowest of the senses, smell, and last the most valuable, the sense of touch, which compels us (by its perception of density or resistance) to project our sensations, and thus wakes in us the idea of an external world.  In themselves sensations are merely subjective states, modes of our own being; without the sense of touch we would ascribe odor, sound, and color to ourselves.  Condillac distinguishes between sensation and ideas in a twofold sense, as mere ideas (the memory or imagination of something not present), and as ideas of objective things (the image, representative of a body); this latter sense is meant when he says, touch sensations only are also ideas.

For the details of the deduction, which often makes very happy use of a rich store of psychological material, the reader must be referred to the more extended expositions.  Here we can only cite as examples the chief among the genetic definitions.  Perceptions (impressions) and consciousness are the same thing under different names.  A lively sensation, in which the mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of assuming an additional special faculty in the mind.  Attention, by its retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory.  Double attention—­to a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one—­is comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference) between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea from another naturally connected with it, by the aid of voluntary linguistic symbols, is abstraction; a series of judgments is reflection; and the sum total of inner