To make his point, Condillac (1754/1930) asked his readers to imagine a marble statue that can perceive, remember, and feel but has only the sense of smell. The mental life of the statue consists only of odors; beyond that, it cannot have any conception of any other things external to itself nor can it have sensations of color, sound, or taste. The statue does have the capac- ity for attention because it will attend to whatever odor it experiences. With attention comes feeling because attending to a pleasant odor causes enjoy- ment and attending to an unpleasant odor causes an
In his analysis of language, Condillac (1746/2001) argued that the meaning of words is determined exclusively by how they are habitually used:
To understand how mankind came to agreement among themselves about the signification of words they wished to put into use, it is sufficient to observe that they pronounced them in circumstances in which everyone was obliged to refer to the same perceptions. By that means they fixed the meaning with greater exactness in proportion as the circumstances, by frequent repetition, habituated the mind to connect particular ideas to particular signs. The language of action removed the ambiguities and double meanings which in the beginning would occur very often.