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Vous ecrivez?" and he shook his finger at Longford "Bien'! Ecrivez un roman qui est sain, pure et noble et ze A-penny man vill moque de ca mais ecrivez of ze dirt of ze human naturel, et voila! Ze A-penny man say 'Bon! Ah que c'est l'art! Donnes moi l'ordure que je peux sentir! C'est naturel! C'est divin! C'est l'art!" A murmur, half of laughter, half of shocked protest, went round the table.
The Penser c'est sentir, or the doctrine that all 'ideas' are transformed sensations is his starting-point.
"Penser c'est sentir" was the form in which it was expressed by Condillac, but was equally the view which commended itself to Berkeley, at least in his early writings, to Hume, and to a whole army of successors down to J. S. Mill. We hope we have already sufficiently emphasised the falsity of such a view.
The French writer Buffon said: "Bien écrire, c'est tout; car bien écrire c'est bien sentir, bien penser, et bien dire." ... Let the artist then, by all means, make his work impeccable, clothe his ideas, feelings, visions, in just such garments as can withstand the winds of criticism. He himself must be his cruellest critic.
La patria necesita no sólo la fuerza de los hombres, sino también la piedad, la caridad de las mujeres; no sólo requiere héroes, sino también heroínas. Y las hay, y las ha habido siempre en la historia de la humanidad: y las hay y las ha habido en esta nuestra tierra, cuyo especial privilegio consiste, en sentir de graves autores extranjeros, en que sus mujeres son superiores a los hombres.
It thus leads to problems of abstraction and generalisation and to his whole theory of what he calls the 'intellectual states. He again closely coincides with the French ideologists. He starts by examining Locke and Condillac. He of course professes to hold that Condillac's version of Locke is illegitimate, and ridicules the famous formula penser c'est sentir.
Diderot on Criticism "Il est si difficile de produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si facile de sentir la mediocrite." I have lately seen this quoted as having been said by Diderot.
"Penser c'est sentir," said Condillac. "It is evident," said Bishop Berkeley, "to one who takes a survey of the objects of Human Knowledge that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the Mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination either combining, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the foresaid ways." J. S. Mill tells us, "The points, lines, circles, and squares which one has in his mind are, I apprehend, simply copies of points, lines, circles, and squares which he has known in his experience," and again, "The character of necessity ascribed to the truths of Mathematics and even, with some reservations to be hereafter made, the peculiar certainty attributed to them is an illusion." "In the case of the definitions of Geometry there exist no real things exactly conformable to the definitions." Again Taine, "Les images sont les exactes reproductions de la sensation." Again Diderot, "Pour imaginer il faut colorer un fond et détacher de ce fait des points en leur supposant une couleur differente de celle du fond. Restituez
In other words, Brown, it would seem, really accepts the penser c'est sentir, only that he regards the sentir as including separate classes of feeling, which cannot be regarded as simple 'transformations' of sensation. They are 'states of the mind' caused by, that is, invariably following upon, the simpler states, and, of course, combining in an endless variety of different forms.
He is, however, equally unwilling to admit Reid's 'variety of powers. In fact, his criticism of Condillac shows more affinity than contrast. Condillac erred, he says, in holding that thoughts are 'transformed sensations. This was a false simplification into which he considers Condillac to have been led partly by the ambiguity of the word sentir.
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