Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/236 (page 69)
    BERKELEY AND CONDILLAC why should it seem to happen not in the brain, but outside? These problems are insoluble, given that perceptions are visitors to the mind. Fortunately they are not. Organisms do not sit around passively waiting for sensations to visit them; they actively seek their world; and their perceptions, if they could truly be said to 'represent' anything at all, represent the interac¬ tions between organism and environment. It is a mistake to concentrate too hard on either side of the equation (this leads inevitably either to idealism or to folly]; we must accept instead the fundamentally active role of the process. The Treatise on Sensations was published in 1754. There is some doubt whether Condillac knew the works of Berkeley at first hand when he wrote it. Carr does not hesitate to dismiss the possibility on the grounds that 'in referring to Berkeley he always writes le docteur Bardai, evidence that whilst he was familiar with the English pronunciation of the name he had not seen it in print'.These are slim grounds; spelling was no more standardized in France of the eighteenth century than in Eng¬ land. Voltaire, who had read the New Theory of Vision, called its author 'Dr Barclay', and if Condillac had merely been copying from the Elements of Newton's Philosophy why should he have transcribed it differently? As further evidence for the arbitrari¬ ness of spelling at that time, consider 'Chiseldon', 'Chezeldon' and 'Cheseldon'. So we can deduce precisely nothing from Con- dillac's spelling. On the other hand, Condillac did not know English at the time he wrote the Essai, and it seems unlikely that he learned it in the eight years following. We know that he did not have English in 1746 because of a footnote to his remarks about the difference between French and English poetry: 'Peut- être que le charactère que la nôtre montre dans les ouvrages de Quinault et de la Fontaine prouve que nous n'aurons jamais de poète qui égal la force de Milton; et que le charactère de force qui paroit dans le Paradis perdu, prouve que les Anglais n'aurons jamais de poète égal à Quinault et à la Fontaine.' (Essai, n. i. xv. §155) ('Perhaps the character that our poetry reveals in the works of Quinault and la Fontaine proves that we shall never have a poet with the force of a Milton; and perhaps the character of violence [force] that appears in Paradise Lost proves that the G. Carr, Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations (London; Favil Press, 1930) xxvi. 71