An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge

In his work An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, a leading French advocate of John Locke's ideas, proposed that all human knowledge originates from sensory experience. Condillac, a philosopher and psychologist, argued against innate ideas, suggesting that faculties and knowledge are acquired through a process of transformed sensation. He believed that by observing the qualities of an object in a specific order, the mind can understand its simultaneous existence. This "method of analysis" was seen as a natural way of learning, similar to how children acquire knowledge. Condillac's philosophy, known as sensationalism, significantly influenced the French philosophical movement called Idéologie.12