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The son of a distinguished soldier, he was born in Bourbonnais . His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who in 1420 had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France, and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army, and when the French Revolution broke out, he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais. Elected a deputy of the nobility to the states-general, he sat alongside his friend, the Marquis de La Fayette. In the spring of 1792 he received the rank of maréchal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north; but the influence of the extremists becoming predominant he took indefinite leave of absence, and settled at Auteuil , where, with Condorcet and Cabanis, he devoted himself to scientific studies.
Under the Reign of Terror he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Condillac and Locke, and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy. On the motion of Cabanis, he was named associate of the Institute in the class of the moral and political sciences. He soon began to attract attention by the memoires which he read before his colleagues--papers which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work on ideologyAn ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a " science of ideas. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltansch. The society of "ideologists" at Auteuil embraced, besides Cabanis and Tracy, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de VolneyConstantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney ( February 3, 1757 April 25, 1820) was a French savant. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais from his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney. He was born at Craon ( Mayenne) of good fa and Dominique Joseph GaratDominique Joseph Garat ( September 8, 1749 April 25, 1833) was a French writer and politician. He was born at Bayonne. After a good education under the direction of a relation who was a cur and a period as an advocate at Bordeaux, he came to Paris, where, professor in the National Institute.
Under the empire Tracy was a member of the senate, but took little part in its deliberations. Under the Restoration he became a peer of France, but protested against the reactionary split of the government, and remained in opposition. In 1808 he was elected a member of the Académie françaiseThe Academie francaise (French Academy) is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Academie, limited to forty members, has the task of acting as an official authority on the language, even though it has no enf in place of Cabanis, and in 1832Events February 12 Ecuador annexes the Galapagos Islands February 12 serious cholera epidemic begins in London from the East London. It is declared officially over in early May but deaths continue. At least 3000 victims March 24 In Hiram, Ohio a group of he was also named a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences on its reorganization. He appeared, however, only once at its conferences, owing to his age and to disappointment at the comparative failure of his work. He died at Paris.
Destutt de Tracy was the last eminent representative of the sensualistic school which Condillac founded in France upon a one-sided interpretation of Locke. He pushed the sensualistic principles of Condillac to their last consequences, being in full agreement with the materialistic views of Cabanis, though the attention of the latter was devoted more to the physiological, that of Tracy to the psychological or "ideological" side of man. His ideology, he frankly stated, formed "a part of zoology," (biology). The four faculties into which he divides the conscious life--perception, memory, judgment, will--are all varieties of sensation. Perception is sensation caused by a present affection of the external extremities of the nerves; memory is sensation caused, in the absence of present excitation, by dispositions of the nerves which are the result of past experiences; judgment is the perception of relations between sensations, and is itself a species of sensation, because if we are aware of the sensations we must be aware also of the relations between them; will he identifies with the feeling of desire, and therefore includes it as a variety of sensation. It is easy to see that such conclusions ignore important distinctions, and are, indeed, to a large extent an abuse of language. As a psychologistA psychologist is a practitioner of psychology. Psychology is now considered a separate field from psychiatry, and a psychologist is not ordinarily a medical doctor and hence is unable to prescribe psychiatric medications. They are specially trained to pr de Tracy deserves credit for his distinction between active and passive touch, which developed into the theory of the muscular sense. His account of the notion of external existence, as derived, not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, may be compared with the work of Alexander BainAlexander Bain ( June 11, 1818 September 18, 1903) was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist. He was born in Aberdeen, and went to school there, but took up the profession of a weaver, hence the punning description of him as Weevir, rex philosophorum' and later psychologists.
His chief works are Elements d'ideologie (1817-1818), in which he presented the complete statement of his earlier monographs; Commentaire sur I'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (1806; Eng. trans., Thomas Jefferson, 1811); Essai sur le genie, et les ouvrages de Montesquieu (1808). See histories of philosophy, especially F Picavet, Les Ideologues chs. v. and vi. (Paris, 1891), and La Philosophie de Biran (Academie des sci. fnor. et pol., 1889).
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Please update as neeeded.
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