Very little is known about the particulars of his life. He was of a serious and dignified character, and devoted himself to a life of laborious study. Like Comte and Mill, he acknowledges himself to have been largely indebted to a lady for his philosophical inspiration, While still young he was appointed preceptor to the duke of Parma, grandson of Louis XV. He lived in retirement on his estate of Flux, near Beaugency, till his death on 3d August The first of these was his earliest production, and may be regarded as the preliminary sketch of his entire system.
It touches more or less distinctly on all the topics which are discussed in the others. But the doctrines it contains receive a fuller and more mature statement elsewhere, and there are many important departures from them in the later works.
Condillac's philosophical writings may be studied from three points of view. Like Locke, he begins with a polemic against innate ideas and abstract systems. In the Logique and the Art de Raisonner he expounds and illustrates the analytic method, which he regards as the only true method of science, and which is further illustrated in La Langue des Calculs.
L'Art de Penser consists largely of quotations from the Essai sur l'Origine. It cannot be said that he strictly confines himself to the questions here assigned to his different works. His inveterate antipathy to innate ideas and abstract systems, his favour for analysis, and his peculiar psychological doctrines appear more or less in them all.
Condillac's main attacks are directed against the innate ideas of Descartes, Malebranche's theory of the mental faculties, the monadology of Leibnitz, and the first part of Spinoza's Ethik. He thinks that innate ideas were assumed because men had not sagacity and penetration enough to go back to the origin of ideas and trace their genesis, and he finds the consequences of the system to be the multiplication of abstract principles, and a pretence of accounting for everything by the use of abstract terms.
