murder, whatever their motives or the character of their causation, are instances of real disorder in the moral world, because violations of a law which is not created by any thoughts or imaginations of ours. There is a plain distinction between causation and fitness, and the latter is as really in nature as the former.

Man, according to Holbach, is entirely material. Immateriality and spirituality he pronounces to be meaningless words. The mental faculties he represents as only determinate manners of acting which result from the peculiar organisation of the body; feeling, thought, and will, as only modifications of the nerves and brain. He reiterates and amplifies these assertions, but he does not prove them; and, indeed, they are obviously not only erroneous but nonsensical. The brain is a thing which can be examined by sight and other senses; its minutest changes might be traced by an eye of sufficient strength, or by an ordinary eye assisted by a sufficiently powerful microscope; but a thought, a feeling, a volition cannot even be conceived as perceived by the sight or any sense. When a man describes any state of consciousness as a modification of the brain, or of any part of the body, he uses language to which no meaning can be attached.

Holbach, believing that there is no God, and that all that is called spirit in man is merely a

modification of the body, naturally denies both immortality and freewill. The belief in a future life is represented as a dream, a delusion. The grave is supposed to receive into it the whole man. Free agency is regarded as a mere fiction. "Man's life," we are told, "is a line drawn by nature from which he cannot swerve even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organisation in no wise depends upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, and which necessarily determine his way of thinking and manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, rational or irrational, without his will going for anything in these various states."

There is thus, according to Holbach, no God, no soul, no future life, no freewill. Many will think that from these premises he should have drawn the conclusion, there is no morality. He did not quite do that, for the man was greatly better than his system; but, of course, he could not inculcate a pure or high morality. He could only rest duty on self-interest. He could only

recommend virtue as a means to each man's happiness. "Disinterested," he tells us, "is a term only applied to those of whose motives.

we are ignorant, or whose interest we approve," and "virtue is only the art of rendering one's self happy by the felicity of others." It would be unjust and ungenerous to deny that he recommended the various personal and social virtues with warmth, and in the accents of sincerity; but it was on grounds which can be naturally and readily employed to excuse vice.1

The moral principles advocated by La Mettrie and Holbach were not peculiar to them. Helvetius, Saint Lambert, Morelly, and a host of other writers, likewise inculcated a more or less refined selfishness, as the sole sure basis both of ethical theory and ethical life. They could not consistently do anything else. Materialism and sensationalism can provide no other basis for morality than self-love. But on such a basis morality can never either rise high or stand firm. The nation whose life rests on so crumbling a corner-stone is on the eve of a catastrophe. This was exemplified in the case of France. would be incorrect, I believe, to say that the sceptics and atheists of that country caused, with their false and pernicious principles, either the Revolution or the horrors which accompanied it. The corrupt and disorganised state of society at that time contributed to form scepticism and atheism not less than scepticism and atheism 1 See Appendix XIII.

It

contributed to deteriorate society. There was action and reaction. The atheism of the epoch was as much the effect as the cause of its corruption. It was, certainly, not wholly either the effect or the cause, but was partly both. Further, the enormous and bewildering mass of events and declarations called the French Revolution need not be pronounced either wholly or mainly evil, nor need the sceptical philosophers be denied to have been largely instrumental in diffusing salutary truths as well as pernicious errors. We may give all due justice to the Revolution and its authors and yet hold that its worst features were the natural expressions of the materialistic and atheistic views and the selfish and sensuous principles prevalent in the generation which accomplished it, and in the generation which preceded it. When God was decreed a non-entity and death an eternal sleep, when divine worship was abolished and marriage superseded, the rights of property disregarded, and life lavishly and wantonly sacrificed, the atheistical materialism of La Mettrie and Von Holbach was seen bearing its appropriate poisonous fruit. If you convince men that in nature and destiny they are not essentially different from the beasts that perish, it may well be feared that they will live and act as beasts, casting off, as far as they can, all the restraints imposed by human and divine institutions, all

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the bonds of the family, the Church, and the State.

While materialism contributed in a considerable measure to bring about the Revolution, the Revolution did little to diffuse materialism and much to discredit it. A reaction set in. A vast intellectual and moral change, the causes of which have not yet, perhaps, been adequately traced, came over the European mind. Religion, poetry, literature, science, philosophy, were all permeated and quickened by a new and deeper spirit. The consequence was that materialism lost its hold on men's minds and sank into general contempt. The generation that admired Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Cousin, Hamilton, could only wonder that a theory so poor and shallow as materialism had ever exerted a wide and powerful influence. It seemed as if its day were past; as if it could never return, except, perhaps, in some very subtle and refined form.

But it is not to be hoped that materialism will ever quite be got rid of, so long as the constitution of the human mind and the character of human society remain substantially what they are. Physical nature and its laws explain much, and so long as the human mind is prone to exaggeration, and education is imperfect and one-sided, and society is more under the influence of the seen than the