Destutt de Tracy - Philosophy

Philosophy

Destutt de Tracy was the last eminent representative of the sensualistic school which Condillac founded in France upon a one-sided interpretation of Locke. In full agreement with the materialist views of Cabanis, de Tracy pushed the sensualist principles of Condillac to their most necessary consequences. While the attention of Cabanis was devoted mostly to the physiological side of man, Tracy's interests concerned the then newly determined "ideological," in contrast to "psychological," sides of humanity. His grounding notion of ideology, he frankly stated, fell as "a part of zoology" (biology). The four faculties into which de Tracy divides the conscious life—perception, memory, judgment, volition—are all varieties of sensation. Perception is sensation caused by a present affection of the external extremities of the nerves; memory is sensation caused, in the absence of present excitation, by dispositions of the nerves which are the result of past experiences; judgment is the perception of relations between sensations, and is itself a species of sensation, because if we are aware of the sensations we must be aware also of the relations between them; and volition he identifies with the feeling of desire, and is therefore included as a type of sensation.

Considered for the influences of his philosophy, de Tracy minimally deserves credit for his distinction between active and passive touch, which ultimately fed the development of psychological theories of muscular sense. His account of the notion of external existence, as it derived not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, stands in this light to be compared with the works of Alexander Bain and later psychologists.