ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empiricism and materialism provided a rational basis for the study of consciousness. This allowed ‘Idéologie’ to take its place among the sciences of the Enlightenment. But in the process of analysing the formation of ideas, the idéologues deprived this process of the dignity and reverence to which it had previously seemed entitled. In particular, the concept of the soul could have no place in the materialism of the philosophes. Destutt de Tracy’s remark that ‘Idéologie’ was a branch of zoology evinced a rather cavalier attitude to the cherished notion that there is some kind of supernatural, quasi-divine essence within the mind which elevates humanity above the animals. Rousseau provided one escape route for
those whose sensibilities were too delicate to countenance studying the mind like any other object of science. But Rousseau wrote in direct reaction to the doctrines of materialism, and his glorification of the autonomous, individual self is merely the reverse side, the antithesis, of Condillac and Destutt’s dour sensationalism. For a more rational and coherent account of the mind’s freedom from matter, it is necessary to return to the seventeenth century, to the work of René Descartes.
