CHAPTER IV 



THE CAPRICORN 



My youthful meditations owe some happy moments to 

 Condillac's ^ famous statue which, when endowed with 

 the sense of smell, inhales the scent of a rose and out of 

 the single impression creates a whole world of ideas. 

 My twenty-year-old mind, full of faith in syllogisms, 

 loved to follow the deductive jugglery of the abbe-phi- 

 losopher: I saw, or seemed to see, the statue take life in 

 that action of the nostrils, acquiring attention, memory, 

 judgment and all the psychological paraphernalia, even as 

 still waters are aroused and rippled by the impact of a 

 grain of sand. I recovered from my illusion under the 

 instruction of my abler master, the animal. The Capri- 

 corn shall teach us that the problem is more obscure than 

 the abbe led me to believe. 



When wedge and mallet are at work, preparing my 

 provision of firewood under the gray sky that heralds 



^ Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abbe de Mureaux (1715-80), the 

 leading exponent of sensational philosophy. His most important 

 work is the Traite des sensations, in which he imagines a statue, 

 organized like a man, and endows it with the senses one by one, 

 beginning with that of smell. He argues by a process of imagi- 

 native reconstruction that all human faculties and all human 

 knowledge are merely transformed sensation, to the exclusion of 

 any other principle, that, in short, everything has its source in 

 sensation : man is nothing but what he has acquired. — Translator's 

 Note. 



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