Note 1 — Chapter V · ABERRATIONS OF INSTINCT

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abbé de Mureaux (1715–1780), the leading exponent of sensual philosophy. His most important work is a Traité des sensations, in which he imagines a statue organized like a man and endows it with the senses one by one, beginning with that of smell. He argues by a process of imaginative reconstruction that all human faculties and all human knowledge are merely transformed sensations, to the exclusion of any other principle; in short, that everything has its source in sensation: man is nothing but what he has acquired.—Translator’s Note. ↑