Essay on the origin of human knowledge Etienne Bonnot de Condillac ; translated and edited by Hans Aarsleff

Part I. The Materials of our Knowledge and Especially the Operations of the Soul. -- Section 1. The material of our knowledge and the distinction of soul and body. -- Senations. -- Section 2. Analysis and generation of the operations of the soul. -- Perception, consciusness, attention, and reminiscense. -- Imagiantion, contemplation, and memory. -- How the connection of ideas, formed by attention, brings forth imagination, contemplation, and memory. -- The use of signs is the true cause of the progress of imagination, contemplation, and memory. -- Reflection. -- Operations that consist in distinguishing, abstracting, comparing, and decompounding, and decompounding our ideas. -- Digression on the origin of principles and the operation that consists in analysis. -- Affirming. Denying. Judging. Reasoning. Conceiving. The understanding. -- Defects and advantages of the imagination. -- The source of charms that imagination gives to truth. -- On reason and on intellect and its different aspects. -- Section 3. Simple and complex ideas. -- Section 4. The operation by which we give signs to our ideas. -- Facts that confirm what was proved in the previous chapter. -- Section 5. Abstractions. -- Section 6. Some judgments that have been erroneously attributed to the mind, or the solution of a metaphysical problem. -- Part II. Language and Method. -- Section 1. The origin and progress of language. -- The language of action and that of articulated sounds considered from their point of origin. -- The prosod of the first languages. -- The prosody of the Greek and Latin languages and, en passant, the declamation of the ancients. -- Music. -- Musical and plain declamation compared. -- Which is the most perfect prosody?. -- The origin of poetry. -- Words. -- The same subject continued. -- The signification of words. -- Inversions. -- Writing. -- Origin of the fable, the parable, and the enigma, with some details about the use of figures and metaphors. -- The genius of languages. -- Section 2. Method. -- The first cause of our errors and the oring of truth. -- The manner of determining ideas or their names. -- The order we ought to follow in the search for truth. -- The order to be followed in the exposition of truth.

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