“ He enlarges with much iteration, but with few concrete examples, upon the supremacy of the analytic method; argues that reasoning consists in the substitution of one proposition for another which is identical with it; and lays it down that science is the same thing as a well-constructed language, a proposition which in his Langue des calculs he tries to prove by the example of arithmetic. His logic has in fact the good and bad points that we might expect to find in a sensationist who knows no science but mathematics. ”

“ The result, he was confident, would show that all human faculty and knowledge are transformed sensation only, to the exclusion of any other principle, such as reflection. The plan of the book is that the author imagines a statue organized inwardly like a man, animated by a soul which has never received an idea, into which no sense-impression has ever penetrated. He then unlocks its senses one by one, beginning with smell, as the sense that contributes least to human knowledge. At its first experience of smell, the consciousness of the statue is entirely occupied by it ”

“ The conclusion of the whole work is that in the natural order of things everything has its source in sensation, and yet that this source is not equally abundant in all men; men differ greatly in the degree of vividness with which they feel; and, finally, that man is nothing but what he has acquired ”

“ Unfortunately it must be said of him as of so many of his contemporaries, “er hat die Theile in seiner Hand, fehlt leider nur der geistiger Band”; in the analysis of the human mind on which his fame chiefly rests, he has missed out the active and spiritual side of human experience. His first book, the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, keeps close to his English master. He accepts with some indecision Locke’s deduction of our knowledge from two sources, sensation and reflection, and uses as his main principle of explanation the association of ideas. ”