to do in order to obtain the happiness which thou makest him desire. Banish error from our mind, wickedness from our hearts, confusion from our footsteps; cause knowledge to extend its benignant reign, goodness to occupy our souls, serenity to dwell in our bosoms."

There are numerous passages of this character in the System of Nature.' Sometimes even a

better genius than his own familiar spirit takes possession of its author, and causes him utterly to forget that he is the avowed enemy of theism, and a believer only in matter and motion. Witness a passage like the following, which is in direct contradiction to the atheism he usually and explicitly inculcates: "The great Cause of causes must have produced everything; but is it not lessening the true dignity of the Divinity to introduce Him as interfering in every operation of nature-nay, in every action of so insignificant a creature as man, as a mere agent, executing His own eternal, immutable laws; when experience, when reflection, when the evidence of all we contemplate, warrants the idea that this ineffable Being has rendered nature competent to every effect, by giving her those irrevocable laws, that eternal, unchangeable system, according to which all the beings she sustains must eternally act? Is it not more worthy of the exalted mind of the Great Parent of parents, ens entium, more consistent with truth,

to suppose that His wisdom, in giving these immutable, these eternal laws to the macrocosm, foresaw everything that could possibly be requisite for the happiness of the beings contained in it; that, therefore, He left it to the invariable operation of a system, which never can produce any effect that is not the best possible that circumstances, however viewed, will admit?”

In the work under consideration, order and confusion are maintained to have no existence in nature itself. All is necessarily in order, we are told, since everything acts and moves according to constant and invariable laws; confusion is consequently impossible. But as it is at the same time admitted that a series of motions or actions, although necessitated, may or may not conspire to one common end, and as coexistent individuals of any kind may either promote or oppose the development of one another, the reality both of order and confusion is actually granted while professedly denied. That a child should be born without eyes or legs is as much an effect of natural causes as that it should be born with them; but seeing that eyes and legs are really useful to human beings, and not merely supposed by them to be useful, the possession or want of eyes and legs may be characterised with the strictest propriety as an example of order or confusion. In like manner, theft and

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 or ethical theory and ethical life. consistently do anything else. sensationalism can provide no

They could not Materialism and

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. It 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.