Knight I.F. The geometric spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment

Yale: Yale University Press, 1968. — 330 p.The prevailing state of mind among the men of the French Enlightenment was dissatisfaction. Sometimes it took the form of good-humored exasperation with human folly and gullibility; often it blazed out in bitter anger at the cruel irrationality of man’s— or God’s—inhumanity to man. In any case, the men of the Enlightenment felt—most of them— that the intellectual and social fabric of their time, together with the Christian cosmology which justified it, was coming apart at the seams, and deservedly so. Their job was to hasten the day.
Thus the prevailing fnode of action among the philosophes was: ATTACK. They attacked the Church, they attacked the State, they attacked warfare, they attacked intolerance; they attacked the philosophical traditions, the social hierarchies, the educational system, and the economic organization; they attacked provincialism, prejudice, pretension, and pride. No person, no institution, no belief that was part of the Old Regime— the Establishment—was safe from their persistent, pugnacious, and revolutionary criticism.
But the revolution they intended was not the bloody overthrow of kings and cardinals; they intended a revolution at once less violent and more profound. As Diderot put it, they meant to "change the general way of thinking.” This accomplished, the Old Regime would perish of itself, and a new and better society, a society of free and enlightened men— free because enlightened— would rise on its ruins.
The new way of thinking preached by the philosophes was captured in a phrase: "the geometric spirit.” If it triumphed, the geometric spirit would liberate men from the tyranny of superstition, prejudice, ignorance, theology, and metaphysics (nearsynonyms in the philosophes’ vocabulary) by eaching them to think clearly, rationally, and scientifically. The official theoretician PREFACE of the geometric spirit was a professed Catholic, an inactive priest, and a political conservative: Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. More than anyone else, it was Condillac who systematized the geometric spirit, setting down its epistemological foundation and deriving from it a methodology whose universal application would, he felt,
open the doors to all the knowledge available to man. He himself took the geometric spirit into psychology, linguistics, aesthetics,education, economics, and history.
This present study of the geometric spirit, as Condillac understood and practiced it, is meant to illuminate the texture, the inner structure, and the half-acknowledged tensions of Enlightenment thought—the intellectual life of the age as it was experienced by those who lived it. W ith this larger purpose in mind, I have not limited myself to Condillac's thought alone; I have compared his ideas, attitudes, and assumptions with those of his contemporaries and often of his predecessors wherever it seemed fruitful to do so.
Thus I have tried to portray Condillac’s mind both as a unique phenomenon and as a paradigm of the mind of his age. One major aspect of Condillac’s thought has not been treated here, except incidentally: his historical writings. More than half of Condillac’s writings are devoted to history, and to deal with the subject adequately would have required several more chapters: on progress and decadence, on the relationship of the Enlightenment to the past in general as well as to certain crucial periods of the past, on historical causation, on the moral uses of history, on
Providence, and on politics— to name only the most obvious. To attempt the task would have lengthened this work intolerably.
But it is to be hoped that this significant gap in Enlightenment studies will soon be filled.