Memory, Imagination and Language in Eighteenth-Century French Sensualism

Most eighteenth-century philosophers tended to attach memory to imagination, thinking that memory basically consists in the reproduction of previously received sensations, which have perhaps only lost some of their vividness. In his Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746) Condillac, however, insists on separating memory and imagination. This is surprising in so far as one would expect him, as a sensualist, to reduce memory to the faculty of reproducing sensations in the manner of Locke and other empiricists. But in fact, Condillac emphasizes that one can well remember perceptions without being able to reproduce them. He claims that the capacity to remember requires the ability to use conventional signs, that is, language. Instead of picturing memory as the reproduction of sensations or of ideas, he sees it consisting in the capacity to form connections between ideas, insisting at the same time on their organization as well as on the role of this organization in voluntary search and recall. Attaching the capacity to direct attention to the use of conventional signs, Condillac contrasts the voluntary nature of memory processes with the passivity of imagination. Condillac's view of memory as an active and complex process of conceptual organization involving language appears in many respect advanced in comparison to the simplifications of many of his contemporaries and, in fact, also compared to many of his followers, who continued the tradition which sees memory merely in terms of passive recording and reproduction of sensations or of images.