ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the reception of Condillac in the philosophy of Auguste Comte and, in particular, Comte’s discussion of the status of human abilities in relation to Gall’s cerebral physiology, to which Comte fully adheres. On the issue of intellectual and moral faculties, Comte and Gall indeed endorsed an anti-sensationalist position which led them both to reject en bloc the thesis of transformed sensation. This rejection, however, conceals an unquestionable agreement with Condillac on the nature of the so-called animal faculties. The second point of divergence concerns the analytical method and the heuristic value of decomposition. Here Auguste Comte’s holism functions the anthesis of Condillac’s logic. The third point, finally, deals with algebra and Condillac’s thesis that mathematics is a well-formed language. After having endorsed this thesis during his youth, Comte later strongly opposed it, arguing against the importance of language for scientific reasoning. All these disagreements would eventually lead to the marginalisation of the sensationalist and analytic tradition within French empiricist philosophy.
