Note 28 — LA METTRIE’S RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS AND TO HIS SUCCESSORS.

Condillac and La Mettrie agree that experience is the source of all knowledge. As Lange suggests,28 La Mettrie’s development of reason from the imagination may have suggested to Condillac the way to develop all the faculties from the soul. La Mettrie asserts that reason is but the sensitive soul contemplating its ideas, and that imagination plays all the rôles of the soul, while Condillac elaborates the same idea, and shows in great detail how all the faculties of the soul are but modifications of sensation.29