Note 161 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as an “animated statue,” of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie, by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and systematizer than an originator;161 but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important as the first steps;162 and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the same may be said of the next figure in the “materialistic” series, J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been, it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761–1768) is a remarkable attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things.163 But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea that the universe is an “animal” he had perhaps a premonition of the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life; but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768) he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a strictly scientific and human footing,164 extending the arguments of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville.165 On another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville’s thesis had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l’Esprit166 (1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand, but still reflected in censures no less surprising.