f^-vX^ 



H. V-^^'^ 



r^v.-- \f^ 



CHAPTER VII 



THE CAPRICORN 



1\/TY youthful meditations owe some happy 

 ^^ ^ moments to Condillac's ^ famous sta- 

 tue which, when endowed with the sense of 

 smell, inhales the scent of a rose and out of 

 that single impression creates a whole world 

 of ideas. My twenty-year-old mind, full of 

 faith in syllogisms, loved to follow the de- 

 ductive jugglery of the abbe-philosopher: 

 I saw, or seemed to see, the. statue take life 

 in that action of the nostrils, acquiring at- 

 tention, memory, judgment and all the psy- 

 chological paraphernalia, even as still waters 

 are aroused and rippled by the impact of a 

 grain of sand. I recovered from my illu- 

 sion under the instruction of my abler mas- 



1 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abbe de Mureaux 

 (1715-1780), the leading exponent of sensational philoso- 

 phy. His most important work is the Traite des sensa- 

 tions, in which he imagines a statue, organized like a 

 man, and endows it with the senses one by one, begin- 

 ning with that of smell. He argues by a process of 

 imaginative 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. 

 185 



