Traité des sensations, à Madame la comtesse de Vassé

First edition.

Contemporary full tree-grained sheepskin, spine with five raised bands, gilt compartments and fleurons between the bands, blond leather lettering-pieces, gilt fillet to the board edges, shell-paper pastedowns, red edges. Some rubbing and losses, corners lightly bumped, upper corner of the rear board damaged, a manufacturing flaw to the pastedowns, minor foxing and soiling.

The fundamental work of sensualist philosophy, in a strictly contemporary binding.

In the Traité des sensations, the abbé de Condillac conducts a thought experiment: imagining how a being deprived of all ideas might nevertheless acquire them through the senses. To this end he invokes the image of a statue to which he grants, at first, only the sense of smell, this sense becoming the first means by which it attains consciousness of itself. In smelling the scent of a rose, the statue does not know that it is a statue smelling a rose: to itself, it is nothing other than that scent, since it knows nothing beyond this single sensation. By presenting it in turn with different flowers, it is made to acquire new sensations: it becomes, according to the object acting upon its organ, the scent of a rose, of a carnation, of jasmine, of violet, and so on. From this single modification already arise attention, memory, judgment by comparison, and a love that is as yet nothing but self-love. All the higher faculties of the mind (judgment, reflection, desires, passions) are, in Condillac's own formula, nothing but "sensation itself, transformed in different ways", a thesis by which he sought to dispense with any innate faculty and to found the understanding on sensory experience alone. Reflection, for its part, arises only with touch: having become mobile, the statue discovers through contact first its own body and then the external world, and touch then instructs smell, hearing, sight, and taste.

In 1768, this important work earned Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, abbé de Mureaux and tutor to the grandson of Louis XV, a seat at the Académie française. The term "sensualism" itself postdates the work: it is generally attributed to Joseph-Marie de Gérando, linguist and one of the pioneers of anthropology.

Although the book is formally dedicated to the comtesse de Vassé, it is to her friend Élisabeth Ferrand, another French salonnière and philosopher, that the author pays lengthy tribute in his preface - she may in fact have been the true originator of the sensualist thesis:

"Mademoiselle Ferrand enlightened me as to the principles, the plan, and the smallest details, and I owe her all the more gratitude in that her design was neither to instruct me nor to make a Book. She did not perceive that she was becoming an Author, and had no other purpose than to converse with me about matters in which I took some interest."

Both installed in apartments in the faubourg Saint-Germain, Élisabeth Ferrand and the comtesse de Vassé received a society of leading scholars and philosophers, among them Clairaut, Réaumur, Helvétius, and Cramer, as well as the brothers Bonnot de Mably and Condillac. Condillac indeed became one of the principal beneficiaries of Mademoiselle Ferrand's will.

An important eighteenth-century philosophical treatise, whose conception owed its inspiration to Mademoiselle Ferrand, an erudite salonnière of Enlightenment Paris.