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Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge
Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. His work influenced many later philosophers, and also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language and its relation to mind and thought.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1746
About the author
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
711 books18 followersÉtienne Bonnot de Condillac, abbé de Mureau, est un philosophe, écrivain, académicien et économiste français. Il était le frère cadet de Gabriel Bonnot de Mably.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac was a French philosopher, epistemologist, writer, academic and economist. He was the younger brother of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac was a French philosopher, epistemologist, writer, academic and economist. He was the younger brother of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 12, 2025
Condillac was heavily influenced by Locke's empiricism, but he also thought that his writing wasn't very clear. I can't say that Condillac did very much to clear things up. This is essentially a summary of Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" for 18th Century French readers, but at least it's half the length of Locke's original, and its impact may be greater on the modern world than many of us in the Anglican sphere have appreciated.
Both philosophers were interested in where ideas originate, and thus were speculating on the origins of the human mind. Both agreed that our ideas come purely from experience with our world through our senses. Our imaginary ideas even come from experience. When we use our imagination to come up with a fictional adventure or describe a fantastical beast, we borrow from elements that we have seen or experienced in real life. But where Locke was straightforward in his writing, Condillac embellished with poetic proto-romanticism. Locke flatly states that our imagination creates a chimera of data we experienced in real life, while Condillac opines:
"...imagination derives her graces from the privilege she has of borrowing whatever appears most amiable and most agreeable in the various parts of nature, in order to adorn the subject she handles. Nothing comes amiss to her; she makes every thing her own, as soon as she knows it can increase her lustre. She is like a bee that culls the treasure from the choicest flowers: or like a coquette, who eager to please her admirers, consults her caprice rather than her reason."
What a whimsical lady is this Imagination of which Condillac speaks! Is she single?
So I don't think Condillac is any "clearer" than Locke. He is, perhaps, more intentional as a psychologist than his predecessor, using case studies to illustrate some of his conclusions. For example, he tells the story of a man who was born deaf, and therefore didn't speak until he shocked his community by uttering his first verbal communication. Over time, the young man was able to explain that one day fluid drained from his ears, and he was able to hear the sound of church bells. At first, he was shocked and even frightened at the new sensation. He had no idea about sound before, let alone what church bells were. Only with consistent stimulation from auditory experience could he reflect on the information provided by this new sense and form new ideas about his world. He had been able to hear for quite some time before he started speaking, because he had to observe his social environment to start pairing the sounds that people made with objects, actions, and so forth. Though his own speech never became fluent due to his early hearing impairment, his new linguistic powers allowed him to better encode memories, and thus increased his ability to access data and compare them to make ideas of his own. Prior to language, he had been quite dependent on direction from his social supports, and so was described as passive and intellectually disabled--but after his ability to hear and use language, he developed his own agency and was better able to form his own ideas. Condillac also compares this to a report of a feral child who, once taught language, was able to report little memory of anything that happened to him prior to his ability to speak.
Thus, Condillac emphasizes both the need for proper sensory input, but also language, for proper human development of reason. In the modern world, this would seem to indicate how important it is for early intervention of hearing impaired folks in learning sign language. He believed that language helped to encode more complex memories, thus allowing for more complex comparison of data for more complex ideas, which are also retained in a narrative experience of consciousness, and thus the experience of self. He is not saying that the deaf boy or the feral child had NO ability to have ideas or to make memories, but both had no conscious narrative of themselves prior to language. Why is that?
Condillac describes three types of "signs" necessary for full mental development: accidental, natural, and instituted. Signs are how we elevate sensory inputs from mere experience to structured understanding. The deaf boy and the boy surviving in the woods had "accidental signs". They may have remembered that, in a particular place, they felt pain and thus would avoid that place. But without language, they had only a vague memory of a dog biting them on a street corner, but couldn't encode the archetype of the dog or the components of the environment that made up the street corner because they had no idea of "dog" or "street" in the first place. The boy in the woods, due to his hearing, may have been able to receive "natural" signs, such as the cries of animals associated with danger, pain, or aggression. The deaf boy had even less of an advantage, only having visual clues and body language to tie ideas to experiences. Both boys lacked "instituted signs", of which language and mathematics are a part. Without instituted signs, there is impaired ability for reflection on ideas, especially abstract ones, and thus the brain operates almost on autopilot, such as reacting with automatic fight-or-flight when triggered by the accidental sign of being in an environment that reminds the individual of previous danger.
What I just described is one of the few areas where Condillac differs from Locke, since the latter did believe that the mind could make propositions by combining and separating ideas without the intervention of words or sounds. For Condillac, the development of language in the human species was necessary for the evolution of mind. In fact, he sees this as so important that he spends a baffling amount of space in this book giving us his speculative account of the history of gesture, dancing, prosody, articulated vocalizations, language construction, declamation, music, oral poetry, and finally the written word. I don't know how accurate or even necessary this long section really is, but it provided some amusement in its ambitious attempt to give a sweeping account of all human communication.
However, his focus on sounds as cognitive signs explains why Condillac thought that animals without speech do not have the ability to abstract, nor memory, nor an experience of consciousness like humans, and why we ourselves don't have any conscious memories as babies. It also explains why Condillac, like Locke, felt that it was crucial for parents and caregivers to provide children with optimal sensory stimulation, education, and reasoning skills during early development.
Condillac's emphasis on our senses in developing our minds and consciousness further pushed the idea of psychology through the Enlightenment into the modern era of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Today, we accept as a foregone conclusion the importance of early childhood experience, but also we take our own sensory experience for granted. In an age where we are stuck to our phones and communicating through avatars and social media accounts, we impair our ability to recognize and correctly interpret social cues. In communities with absent parents and high drug use, people grow up lacking proper affect control, frustration tolerance, or any kind of compass led by their own ideas of personal values.
And when we do not pay attention to our senses, we start to revert back to previous stages of development.
No wonder time seems to fly. We are losing entire swaths of conscious memory narrative by working all day and spending every evening drinking beer in front of the television. Each day blends into the next. We don't stop and mark a memory of a fragrant flower one day, or delight in the unusually fresh brilliance of new fallen snow the next. We say our kids grow up too fast, but that's because we spend a comparatively low percentage of time actually looking at them, snuggling with them, talking with them, and participating in their growth. Therefore, we didn't make a lot of narrative memories of our children in our conscious lives. This is the kind of philosophy that I suspect led to French modernist writings like that of Marcel Proust, and I would also bet that Condillac would be a supporter of the contemporary psychology of Mindfulness.
Is Condillac himself worth reading? Well, if you are already familiar with Locke, maybe not, which is probably why you will have a hard time finding his work in English. This book was written in 1746, and the translation I read was from way back in 1756! A 1930 version by Hans Aarsleff supposedly was published by Cambridge University in 1971, but I haven't seen that one. The most modern translation is from the Eighties by Franklin Phillip and Harlan Lane, who published all of Condillac's writing for the first time in English in their two-volume set "Philosophical Works of Etienne Bonnot, Abbe De Condillac," which still sells for up to several hundred dollars!
So Condillac had a much greater impact in the French-speaking world, but his influence has quietly bled into the Anglican sphere through the development of psychology, psychoanalytic theory, linguistics, positivism, and philosophy of mind. Let's take his case studies of the deaf boy and the feral boy as examples. Granted, he did not personally examine these boys. These were pure anecdotal cases. In fact, it's possible these stories were urban legends or an amalgam of reports. We've all heard similar stories of children raised by bears and wolves, and of people whose vision or hearing was miraculously restored. But Condillac's method of analyzing case studies for their psychological implications is one of the earliest attempts I've read in popular philosophy of applying empirical evidence to psychological development. Though Condillac never fully committed to the scientific method, his work helped overcome the intertia in metaphysics and epistemology that kept these disciplines from being actual sciences. And while one can argue that the contemporary field of psychology has become more ideological, identity-based, and subjective than empirical (and I do), I think there's at least a little of Condillac in the attempts of psychologists over the past century and a half to approximate a science, following the positivist paradigm of seeking objective truth through empirical evidence.
Condillac did not significantly transform thought in the age of Enlightenment, or turn Locke on his head, but I think he was the unsung missing link between the early British empiricists and spread of modern Western philosophy and psychology. So yes, if you are interested in epistemology, psychology, or the philosophy of mind, you should definitely give Condillac a try.
SCORE: 3.5, rounded to 4 castles in the sky out of 5.
Both philosophers were interested in where ideas originate, and thus were speculating on the origins of the human mind. Both agreed that our ideas come purely from experience with our world through our senses. Our imaginary ideas even come from experience. When we use our imagination to come up with a fictional adventure or describe a fantastical beast, we borrow from elements that we have seen or experienced in real life. But where Locke was straightforward in his writing, Condillac embellished with poetic proto-romanticism. Locke flatly states that our imagination creates a chimera of data we experienced in real life, while Condillac opines:
"...imagination derives her graces from the privilege she has of borrowing whatever appears most amiable and most agreeable in the various parts of nature, in order to adorn the subject she handles. Nothing comes amiss to her; she makes every thing her own, as soon as she knows it can increase her lustre. She is like a bee that culls the treasure from the choicest flowers: or like a coquette, who eager to please her admirers, consults her caprice rather than her reason."
What a whimsical lady is this Imagination of which Condillac speaks! Is she single?
So I don't think Condillac is any "clearer" than Locke. He is, perhaps, more intentional as a psychologist than his predecessor, using case studies to illustrate some of his conclusions. For example, he tells the story of a man who was born deaf, and therefore didn't speak until he shocked his community by uttering his first verbal communication. Over time, the young man was able to explain that one day fluid drained from his ears, and he was able to hear the sound of church bells. At first, he was shocked and even frightened at the new sensation. He had no idea about sound before, let alone what church bells were. Only with consistent stimulation from auditory experience could he reflect on the information provided by this new sense and form new ideas about his world. He had been able to hear for quite some time before he started speaking, because he had to observe his social environment to start pairing the sounds that people made with objects, actions, and so forth. Though his own speech never became fluent due to his early hearing impairment, his new linguistic powers allowed him to better encode memories, and thus increased his ability to access data and compare them to make ideas of his own. Prior to language, he had been quite dependent on direction from his social supports, and so was described as passive and intellectually disabled--but after his ability to hear and use language, he developed his own agency and was better able to form his own ideas. Condillac also compares this to a report of a feral child who, once taught language, was able to report little memory of anything that happened to him prior to his ability to speak.
Thus, Condillac emphasizes both the need for proper sensory input, but also language, for proper human development of reason. In the modern world, this would seem to indicate how important it is for early intervention of hearing impaired folks in learning sign language. He believed that language helped to encode more complex memories, thus allowing for more complex comparison of data for more complex ideas, which are also retained in a narrative experience of consciousness, and thus the experience of self. He is not saying that the deaf boy or the feral child had NO ability to have ideas or to make memories, but both had no conscious narrative of themselves prior to language. Why is that?
Condillac describes three types of "signs" necessary for full mental development: accidental, natural, and instituted. Signs are how we elevate sensory inputs from mere experience to structured understanding. The deaf boy and the boy surviving in the woods had "accidental signs". They may have remembered that, in a particular place, they felt pain and thus would avoid that place. But without language, they had only a vague memory of a dog biting them on a street corner, but couldn't encode the archetype of the dog or the components of the environment that made up the street corner because they had no idea of "dog" or "street" in the first place. The boy in the woods, due to his hearing, may have been able to receive "natural" signs, such as the cries of animals associated with danger, pain, or aggression. The deaf boy had even less of an advantage, only having visual clues and body language to tie ideas to experiences. Both boys lacked "instituted signs", of which language and mathematics are a part. Without instituted signs, there is impaired ability for reflection on ideas, especially abstract ones, and thus the brain operates almost on autopilot, such as reacting with automatic fight-or-flight when triggered by the accidental sign of being in an environment that reminds the individual of previous danger.
What I just described is one of the few areas where Condillac differs from Locke, since the latter did believe that the mind could make propositions by combining and separating ideas without the intervention of words or sounds. For Condillac, the development of language in the human species was necessary for the evolution of mind. In fact, he sees this as so important that he spends a baffling amount of space in this book giving us his speculative account of the history of gesture, dancing, prosody, articulated vocalizations, language construction, declamation, music, oral poetry, and finally the written word. I don't know how accurate or even necessary this long section really is, but it provided some amusement in its ambitious attempt to give a sweeping account of all human communication.
However, his focus on sounds as cognitive signs explains why Condillac thought that animals without speech do not have the ability to abstract, nor memory, nor an experience of consciousness like humans, and why we ourselves don't have any conscious memories as babies. It also explains why Condillac, like Locke, felt that it was crucial for parents and caregivers to provide children with optimal sensory stimulation, education, and reasoning skills during early development.
Condillac's emphasis on our senses in developing our minds and consciousness further pushed the idea of psychology through the Enlightenment into the modern era of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Today, we accept as a foregone conclusion the importance of early childhood experience, but also we take our own sensory experience for granted. In an age where we are stuck to our phones and communicating through avatars and social media accounts, we impair our ability to recognize and correctly interpret social cues. In communities with absent parents and high drug use, people grow up lacking proper affect control, frustration tolerance, or any kind of compass led by their own ideas of personal values.
And when we do not pay attention to our senses, we start to revert back to previous stages of development.
No wonder time seems to fly. We are losing entire swaths of conscious memory narrative by working all day and spending every evening drinking beer in front of the television. Each day blends into the next. We don't stop and mark a memory of a fragrant flower one day, or delight in the unusually fresh brilliance of new fallen snow the next. We say our kids grow up too fast, but that's because we spend a comparatively low percentage of time actually looking at them, snuggling with them, talking with them, and participating in their growth. Therefore, we didn't make a lot of narrative memories of our children in our conscious lives. This is the kind of philosophy that I suspect led to French modernist writings like that of Marcel Proust, and I would also bet that Condillac would be a supporter of the contemporary psychology of Mindfulness.
Is Condillac himself worth reading? Well, if you are already familiar with Locke, maybe not, which is probably why you will have a hard time finding his work in English. This book was written in 1746, and the translation I read was from way back in 1756! A 1930 version by Hans Aarsleff supposedly was published by Cambridge University in 1971, but I haven't seen that one. The most modern translation is from the Eighties by Franklin Phillip and Harlan Lane, who published all of Condillac's writing for the first time in English in their two-volume set "Philosophical Works of Etienne Bonnot, Abbe De Condillac," which still sells for up to several hundred dollars!
So Condillac had a much greater impact in the French-speaking world, but his influence has quietly bled into the Anglican sphere through the development of psychology, psychoanalytic theory, linguistics, positivism, and philosophy of mind. Let's take his case studies of the deaf boy and the feral boy as examples. Granted, he did not personally examine these boys. These were pure anecdotal cases. In fact, it's possible these stories were urban legends or an amalgam of reports. We've all heard similar stories of children raised by bears and wolves, and of people whose vision or hearing was miraculously restored. But Condillac's method of analyzing case studies for their psychological implications is one of the earliest attempts I've read in popular philosophy of applying empirical evidence to psychological development. Though Condillac never fully committed to the scientific method, his work helped overcome the intertia in metaphysics and epistemology that kept these disciplines from being actual sciences. And while one can argue that the contemporary field of psychology has become more ideological, identity-based, and subjective than empirical (and I do), I think there's at least a little of Condillac in the attempts of psychologists over the past century and a half to approximate a science, following the positivist paradigm of seeking objective truth through empirical evidence.
Condillac did not significantly transform thought in the age of Enlightenment, or turn Locke on his head, but I think he was the unsung missing link between the early British empiricists and spread of modern Western philosophy and psychology. So yes, if you are interested in epistemology, psychology, or the philosophy of mind, you should definitely give Condillac a try.
SCORE: 3.5, rounded to 4 castles in the sky out of 5.
March 16, 2019
Essai sur l Origine des Connoissances Humaines
By L’Abbé de Condillac (1714-1794)
Published 1788 this treatise aims to explore the evolution of the human species from the innate five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling to present day communication skills of speaking and writing in coherent languages.
The perception of these sensations by the human ‘soul’ is the first stage of understanding.
Condillac seems to call the soul the human mind or consciousness.
The first half of work goes into great details by analysing how the mind evolved with these perceptions, concentrating attention, recognising and remembering images or sensations,
creating abstract ideas, comparing, confirming or declining, judge and reason.
The second part of the book goes int conjectures on how first communications may have started.
With the instinct of perpetration of human species, families may have grouped making tribes. They soon needed to make sounds and gestures to express the necessities of mutual attraction and survival.
Even though Condillac acknowledges that the holy scriptures confirm that God had instructed the first humans about religion and therefore must have given them a language.
He says that this explanation seems not sufficient for a Philosopher and it would be his duty to explain how this may have come about naturally.
The first basic evolution, however, takes up only a small part of his research and conjectures.
The erudite author relies on Ancient Greek and Roman literature about hymns and odes and songs as well as gestures forming the ancient way of communication.
The French language has derived from the Latin language. This subject is what Condillac knows best. Evolution of grammar and vocabulary, as well as the style of poetry and prose, are extensively analysed.
Philosophers like Locke and Berkeley as well as Hume, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant seem to have influenced our author in his work.
Condillac lacked the awareness of the immense timescale that human evolution in reality needed.
Darwin (1809 – 1882) published his work “On the Origin of Species” almost 100 years later.
His work also seems to be narrow-minded on the global picture of the evolution.
Speaking of other ancient civilisations like the Chinese, Egyptian, Persian and South American and their languages.
However, this book is interesting to read as a historical sample of the many small steps it took to reach today's picture of humankind.
By L’Abbé de Condillac (1714-1794)
Published 1788 this treatise aims to explore the evolution of the human species from the innate five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling to present day communication skills of speaking and writing in coherent languages.
The perception of these sensations by the human ‘soul’ is the first stage of understanding.
Condillac seems to call the soul the human mind or consciousness.
The first half of work goes into great details by analysing how the mind evolved with these perceptions, concentrating attention, recognising and remembering images or sensations,
creating abstract ideas, comparing, confirming or declining, judge and reason.
The second part of the book goes int conjectures on how first communications may have started.
With the instinct of perpetration of human species, families may have grouped making tribes. They soon needed to make sounds and gestures to express the necessities of mutual attraction and survival.
Even though Condillac acknowledges that the holy scriptures confirm that God had instructed the first humans about religion and therefore must have given them a language.
He says that this explanation seems not sufficient for a Philosopher and it would be his duty to explain how this may have come about naturally.
The first basic evolution, however, takes up only a small part of his research and conjectures.
The erudite author relies on Ancient Greek and Roman literature about hymns and odes and songs as well as gestures forming the ancient way of communication.
The French language has derived from the Latin language. This subject is what Condillac knows best. Evolution of grammar and vocabulary, as well as the style of poetry and prose, are extensively analysed.
Philosophers like Locke and Berkeley as well as Hume, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant seem to have influenced our author in his work.
Condillac lacked the awareness of the immense timescale that human evolution in reality needed.
Darwin (1809 – 1882) published his work “On the Origin of Species” almost 100 years later.
His work also seems to be narrow-minded on the global picture of the evolution.
Speaking of other ancient civilisations like the Chinese, Egyptian, Persian and South American and their languages.
However, this book is interesting to read as a historical sample of the many small steps it took to reach today's picture of humankind.
Read
October 10, 2020Condillac basically says he thinks Locke is a genius but didn't write very clearly, so he spends the first half of this book summarising Locke's epistemology in a more systematic form. In part II he gives a historical account of the development of language, with some interesting observations that seem to prefigure philosophers like Wittgenstein. Condillac claims that languages evolved for practical purposes: "want food" "make fire" etc, and are basically conventional sign systems. Languages grow more sophisticated as civilisations develop, and eventually semantics take precedence over the pragmatics in which they are actually rooted. Condillac argues that thought is shaped by language, and for that reason systems of knowledge and understanding tend to vary from place to place as social and linguistic groups differ.
One interesting detail is that despite his almost dogmatic empiricism, Condillac gives a "positive" answer to Molyneux's problem, i.e. vision and touch provide the same ideas of extension and figure, so a blind person restored to sight should correctly identify shapes presented to them. He rightly observes that a person who has been blind for most of their life will probably need time for their eyes to acclimatise, so he dismisses the contrary evidence from Cheselden's cataract surgeries on blind patients.
One interesting detail is that despite his almost dogmatic empiricism, Condillac gives a "positive" answer to Molyneux's problem, i.e. vision and touch provide the same ideas of extension and figure, so a blind person restored to sight should correctly identify shapes presented to them. He rightly observes that a person who has been blind for most of their life will probably need time for their eyes to acclimatise, so he dismisses the contrary evidence from Cheselden's cataract surgeries on blind patients.
August 6, 2010
disciple of locke's much more interesting account of human thought--signs play such a central role here that some passages almost sound like modern semiotics
February 4, 2025
I don’t know what to say about this one other than reaffirming that I really don’t care much for Locke.
The original sin stuff off the bat took me out. That and the weird French obsession with deaf/blind people and feral children.
The original sin stuff off the bat took me out. That and the weird French obsession with deaf/blind people and feral children.
October 2, 2023
Well and clearly written. Proto-semiotics and proto-phenomenology.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews