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THE CAPRICORN.
My youthful meditations owe some happy moments to Condillac's famous statue which, when endowed with the sense of smell, inhales the scent of a rose and out of that single impression creates a whole world of ideas.

(Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abbe de Mureaux (1715-80), the leading exponent of sensational philosophy.

His most important work is the "Traite des sensations," in which he imagines a statue, organized like a man, and endows it with the senses one by one, beginning with that of smell.

He argues by a process of imaginative reconstruction that all human faculties and all human knowledge are merely transformed sensation, to the exclusion of any other principle, that, in short, everything has its source in sensation: man is nothing but what he has acquired .-- Translator's Note.) My twenty-year-old mind, full of faith in syllogisms, loved to follow the deductive jugglery of the abbe-philosopher: I saw, or seemed to see, the statue take life in that action of the nostrils, acquiring attention, memory, judgment and all the psychological paraphernalia, even as still waters are aroused and rippled by the impact of a grain of sand.