How did French sensationalism explain human mental life?

French sensationalism, a branch of Empiricism, explained human mental life by rejecting the existence of innate ideas and positing that the mind begins as a tabula rasa, or "clean slate."12

The movement’s leading figure, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, argued that all human faculties—including attention, memory, and judgment—are derived entirely from sensory experience. In his Treatise on the Sensations, Condillac used the thought experiment of a statue to demonstrate that as senses are activated, the mind develops consciousness of these sensations, which then evolve into complex cognitive processes. For Condillac, attention is simply the mind’s occupancy by a sensation, while memory is the retention of that experience, and comparison is a form of twofold attention.12

Claude-Adrien Helvétius furthered this view by emphasizing environmentalism, asserting that individuals are born without intellectual endowments and that all differences in human character and intellect are the result of differing experiences and education.2