Chapter 6

Opinions of philosophers

82. We have to insist upon this because many philosophers did not realise that the essence of the soul had to be sought in a first feeling.(38) They strayed because their mind was infected by limited, fallacious principles drawn solely from the sensible conditions of matter and hence applicable only to matter apparent to the senses, not to all entia. These principles, although never truly ontological, were gratuitously taken as such.

83. The greatest obstacle to progress in philosophy is the immense facility people have for assuming that what we perceive with our exterior senses is the only mark of all entia. Actions and passions, they maintain, have to be similar and follow the same laws. Nothing is permitted which is in any way dissimilar from that administered by the senses; nothing must escape the rules of judgment valid for bodies. But the wings of the mind cannot take flight towards the regions of being unless we first realise that everything we perceive through the senses is only a tiny part of being. The senses put us in touch with incipient entities that are relative only to us. Completed ens goes way beyond that, and teaching about it extends to altogether different principles.

84. Nevertheless, we cannot come to a halt before the merely sensible qualities of external bodies. Human beings, dependent on the law of perception,(39) have to suppose the existence of something else, of an act through which bodies exist. We are assisted in this by the imagination, and suppose that the other thing necessary for the subsistence of sensible qualities has its own place located under the sensible, superficial qualities. We call it 'substance' (sub-stans) without realising that if the substance of bodies lies under their surfaces, we could find it by breaking the bodies and searching around inside them - something that cannot be done.(40) Such an entity created by the imaginative faculty is necessarily a mysterious, inexplicable quid. Hence the sensistic conclusion that the substances of things are totally unknown.(41)

85. But if we silence the imagination and pay attention to reason, which is the only true guide in philosophical investigations, we shall easily see that the act through which the sensible qualities exist is simply the sensiferous force(42) manifested in our animal feeling as something extrasubjective when our animal feeling is modified. This is the first thing we understand in bodies, and it alone (determined by its effects, that is, by sensations) is sufficient to make us mentally conceive bodies. It is, therefore, substance (cf. 52), and it is that for which common sense provides the word 'body'.

86. Later, reasoning may find that the sensiferous force given by perception,(43) in order to exist, requires something more than what is included in the perception of bodies. This proximate cause of the force, although called corporeal principle,(44) always remains outside the concept of body, a concept given to us by perception alone.

87. Philosophers who located the substance of bodies in an unknown quid, not discovered with their reason but supposed by their imagination, continued along the same lines when they undertook to resolve the question: 'What does the essence of the soul consist in?'
First, they generalised their teaching about the substance of bodies. According to them, 'The substance of bodies is an unknown quid that gives existence to the sensible qualities overlaying it. The same is true, therefore, about every substance.' Persuaded that every substance has to be conceived or coined in the image of bodily substance, they took the substance of the soul as a support or substratum (sub-stratum) lying under the accidents of the soul but totally unknown.

88. It is obvious that this way of reasoning is quite arbitrary. We must abandon this learned philosophy,(45) for the sake of following common sense which wishes to indicate substances with nouns that grammarians call substantives. These are imposed on all the entia we perceive. According to common sense, perceived ens is substance. But if the substances of things named with words are perceived, they are not unknown; perception is a way of knowing. We should not create substances for ourselves with the imagination, but find them in perception itself whenever this is possible.

89. The entia perceived by us are bodies and our own soul (cf. 12-17). If we wish to discover the substance of bodies and the substance of soul, we have to look for it in perception. We did this when we dealt with the substance of bodies; we must do the same when dealing with the substance of the soul.

90. Note that we cannot in any way perceive that which we do not feel. Perception is experienced cognition (cf. 53), and without feeling there is no experience. We found the substance of body in feeling; and in feeling we must find the substance of the soul.

91. But not every feeling is substance. Some feelings cannot be conceived by themselves alone; they presuppose some other feeling prior to themselves, of which they are modifications. We have to go back to the first feeling through which and in which lie all the others, and prior to which no other feeling is experienced. A first, stable feeling, therefore which makes up the substance of the soul must be present (cf. 52). This is what I have called fundamental feeling.

92. It is extremely easy to perceive the fundamental feeling joined to its modifications, and to grasp it through a first reflection (this explains why common sense calls its principle, soul). But it is equally difficult to distinguish it, by way of new reflections, from its modifications and to recognise that it is the first, the principle of all other particular and accidental feelings.

93. Condillac supposes that sensible life begins as soon as his statue smells a rose.(46) In that first act, presupposed by our philosopher, the statue only senses the scent of a rose; it knows nothing of itself. However, we can give a benign interpretation to Condillac's way of expressing himself. He says that the statue, when smelling the rose, must believe itself to be the scent of the rose. If it has to believe that it is the scent of the rose, the statue must already sense itself because it predicates that scent of itself.

94. Dégerando and others said that only sensations of touch accompany the feeling of ourselves. This is another obviously false opinion when taken in its strict meaning. Benignly interpreted it becomes true; it is true if you mean that the sensation of touch is that which helps us more than any other to distinguish myself from accidental modification.

95. Galluppi is right when he maintains that no sensation is possible unless it is accompanied by our own substantial feeling. As he says: 'Perceiving a sensation means feeling oneself to be modified; it means feeling oneself, having the feeling of myself.'(47) But he concludes erroneously: 'Even from the first sensation we have a perception of myself.'(48) and 'Our sensible life begins with the perception of myself and its sensations.'(49) He does not go back to the fundamental feeling which lies beyond acquired sensations, nor does he succeed in understanding how there is a feeling anterior to intellective perception and consciousness. Finally, because he is ignorant of the teaching about object, he uses this word to indicate the term of sensation. This hurls him into sensism as he struggles to avoid it.

Notes

(38) Sensists would have discovered the essence of the sensitive soul if, instead of allowing themselves to be waylaid by transitory sensations, they had risen to the fundamental feeling. But they would have been unable to arrive at the intellective soul without abandoning their system. Condillac did admit the fundamental feeling to some extent, although the hypothesis of the statue led him to the absurdity of making this feeling arise from sensations. Let me offer the following exceptional quotation from Destutt-Tracy which will confirm what I have said (I am always glad to find my opinions confirmed by others): 'Feeling is a phenomenon of our existence, it is our very existence. A being which feels nothing can indeed exist for other beings if they feel it, but certainly cannot exist for itself because it does not know it.' The final words betray the sensist who confuses knowing with feeling, but the preceding words testify to the teaching I have expounded.

(39) Sistema filosofico, 30-31, 88-94; NE, vol. 2, 583-629.

(40) The essence of the soul is simply the idea of the substance of the soul. Searching for that which makes up the essence of the soul, therefore, is the same as searching for that which makes up its substance. Substance means simply substantial essence..

(41) NE, vol. 1, 47-65.

(42) AMS, 230-245; NE, vol. 2, 632-681.

(43) Sistema filosofico, 88-99.

(44) NE, vol. 2, 855-857.

(45) NE, vol. 1, 29-34.

(46) 'Myself,' says Condillac, 'is a collection of sensations.' This definition lacks whatever gives unity to sensations. It is a definition of myself in which myself is lacking. The same error can be found in his definition of body 'as a collection of qualities which you touch, see, and so on'. Obviously, body is missing from this definition.

(47) Elementi della Psicologia, §7.

(48) Ibid, §8.

(49) Ibid, §10.