human
of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie, by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and systematizer than an originator; [1086] but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important as the first steps; [1087] and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the same may be said of the next figure in the
gpt
series, J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been, it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things. [1088] But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea that the universe is an