disgusting object, as they see in it nothing but the supposed enemy to their happiness, or the censor of their individual conduct. If man, according to his nature, is necessitated to desire his welfare, he is equally obliged to cherish the means by which he believes it is to be acquired: it would be useless, and perhaps unjust, to demand that a man should be virtuous, if he could not be so without rendering himself miserable. Whenever he thinks vice renders him happy, he must necessarily love vice; whenever he sees inutility or crime rewarded and honoured, what interest will he find in occupying himself with the happiness of his fellow creatures, or in restraining the fury of his passions? In fine, whenever his mind is saturated with false ideas and dangerous opinions, it follows of course that his whole conduct will become nothing more than a long chain of errours, a series of depraved actions. We are informed, that the savages, in order to flatten the heads of their children, squeeze them between two boards, by that means preventing them from taking the shape designed for them by nature. It is pretty nearly the same thing with the institutions of man; they commonly conspire to counteract nature-to constrain-to divert -to extinguish the impulse nature has given him, to substitute others which are the source of all his misfortunes. In almost all the countries of the earth man is bereft of truth, is fed with falsehoods, is amused with marvellous chimeras: he is treated like those children whose members are, by the imprudent care of their nurses, swathed with little fillets, bound up with rollers, which deprive them of the free use of their limbs, obstruct their growth, prevent their activity, and oppose themselves to their health. Most of the religious opinions of man have for their object only to display to him his supreme felicity in those illusions for which they kindle his passions: but as the phantoms which are presented to his imagination are incapable of being considered in the same light by all who contemplate them, he is perpetually in dispute concerning these objects; he hates and persecutes his neighbourhis neighbour in turn persecutes himhe believes in doing this he is doing well; that in committing the greatest crimes to sustain his opinions he is acting right. It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel to himself, as he is dangerous and incommodious to others: if, on the contrary, he be phlegmatic or of a slothful habit, he becomes melancholy and is useless to society. Public opinion every instant offers to man's contemplation false ideas of honour and wrong notions of glory: it attaches his esteem not only to frivolous advantages, but also to prejudicial and injurious actions, which example authorizes-which prejudice consecrates-which habit precludes him from viewing with disgust, from eying with the horrour they merit. Indeed, habit familiarizes his mind with the most absurd ideas-with the most unreasonable customs-with the most blameable actions-with prejudices the most contrary to his own interests, the most detrimental to the society in which he lives. He finds nothing strange, nothing singular, nothing despicable, nothing ridiculous, except those opinions and those objects to which he is himself unaccustomed. There are countries in which the most laudable actions appear very blameable and extremely ridiculous, and where the foulest, the most diabolical actions, pass for very honest and perfectly rational.* Authority commonly believes itself interested in maintaining the received opinions; those prejudices and those errours which it considers requisite to the maintenance of its power, are sustained by force, which is never ration * In some nations they kill the old men; in Phenicians and the Carthagenians immolated some the children strangle their fathers. The their children to their Gods. Europeans approve duels; and those who refuse to blow out the brains of another are contemplated by them as dishonoured. The Spaniards, the Portuguese, think it meritorious to burn a heretic. Christians deem it right to cut the throats of those who differ from them in opinion. In some countries women prostitute themselves without dishonour; in others it is the height of hospitality for man to present his wife to the embraces of the stranger: the refusal to accept this, elicits his scorn, calls forth his resentment. al. Princes filled with deceptive images of happiness; with mistaken notions of power; with erroneous opinions of grandeur; with false ideas of glory, are surrounded with flattering courtiers, who are interested in keeping up the delusion of their masters: these contemptible men have acquired ideas of virtue only that they may outrage it: by degrees they corrupt the people, these become depraved, lend themselves to their debaucheries, pander to the vices of the great, then make a merit of imitating them in their irregularities. A court is the true focus of the corruption of a people. This is the true source of moral evil. It is thus that every thing conspires to render man vicious, to give a fatal impulse to his soul; from whence results the general confusion of society, which becomes unhappy from the misery of almost every one of its members. The strongest motive-powers are put in action to inspire man with a passion for futile or indifferent objects, which make him become dangerous to his fellow man by the means which he is compelled to employ in order to obtain them. Those who have the charge of guiding his steps, either impostors themselves, or the dupes to their own prejudices, forbid him to hearken to reason; they make truth appear dangerous to him, and exhibit errour as requisite to his welfare, not only in this world but in the next. In short, habit strongly attaches him to his irrational opinions to his perilous inclinations -to his blind passion for objects either useless or dangerous. Here then is the reason why for the most part man finds himself necessarily determined to evil; the reason why the passions, inherent in his nature and necessary to his conservation, become the instruments of his destruction, the bane of that society which they ought to preserve. Here, then, the reason why society becomes a state of warfare, and why it does nothing but assemble enemies, who are envious of each other and always rivals for the prize. If some virtuous beings are to be found in these societies, they must be sought for in the very small number of those, who, born with a phlegmatic temperament, have moderate passions, who therefore either do not desire at all, or desire very feebly, those objects with which their associ ates are continually inebriated. Man's nature diversely cultivated, decides upon his faculties, as well corporeal as intellectual-upon his qualities, as well moral as physical. The man who is of a sanguine, robust constitution, must necessarily have strong passions: he who is of a bilious, melancholy habit, will as necessarily have fantastical and gloomy passions: the man of a gay turn, of a sprightly imagination, will have cheerful passions; while the man, in whom phlegm abounds, will have those which are gentle, or which have a very slight degree of violence. It appears to be upon the equilibrium of the humours that depends the state of the man who is called virtuous: his temperament seems to be the result of a combination, in which the elements or principles are balanced with such precision, that no one passion predominates over another, or carries into his machine more disorder than its neighbour. Habit, as we have seen, is man's nature modified: this latter furnishes the matter; education, domestic example, national manners, give it the form: these acting on his temperament, make him either reasonable or irrational, enlightened or stupid, a fanatic or a hero, an enthuthiast for the public good, or an unbridled criminal, a wise man smitten with the advantages of virtue or a libertine plunged into every kind of vice. All the varieties of the moral man depend on the diversity of his ideas, which are themselves arranged and combined in his brain by the intervention of his senses. His temperament is the produce of physical substances; his habits are the effect of physical modifications; the opinions, whether good or bad, injurious or beneficial, true or false, which form themselves in his mind, are never more than the effect of those physical impulsions which the brain receives by the medium of the senses. CHAPTER X. The Soul does not derive its Ideas from itself. It has no innate Ideas. WHAT has preceded suffices to prove that the interior organ of man, which But what shall be said of a Berke man, that every thing in this world is nothing more than a chimerical illusion, and that the universe exists nowhere but in himself: that it has no identity but in his imagination; who has rendered the existence of all things problematical by the aid of sophisms, insolvable even to those who maintain the doctrine of the spirituality of the soul.† is called his soul, is purely material. | to delineate to itself the whole uniHe will be enabled to convince him- verse, with all the beings it contains. self of this truth, by the manner in Descartes and his disciples have aswhich he acquires his ideas; from those sured us, that the body went absolutely impressions, which material objects for nothing in the sensations or ideas successively make on his organs, which of the soul; that it can feel-that it are themselves acknowledged to be can perceive, understand, taste, and material. It has been seen that the fa- touch, even when there should exist culties which are called intellectual, nothing that is corporeal or material are to be ascribed to that of feeling; exterior to ourselves. the different qualities of those faculties, which are called moral, have been ex-ley, who has endeavoured to prove to plained after the necessary laws of a very simple mechanism: it now remains to reply to those who still obstinately persist in making the soul a substance distinguished from the body, or who insist on giving it an essence totally distinct. They seem to found their distinction upon this, that this interior organ has the faculty of drawing its ideas from within itself; they will have it that man, at his birth, brings with him ideas into the world, which according to this wonderful notion, they have called innate.* They have believed, then, that the soul, by a special privilege, in a nature where every thing is connected, enjoyed the faculty of moving itself without receiv-contained within the interior of his ing any impulse; of creating to itself machine, who make some parts of his ideas, of thinking on a subject, without body experience those sensations which being determined to such action by any he perceives, and which furnish him exterior object, which, by moving its with ideas, which he relates, faithfully organs, should furnish it with an image or otherwise, to the cause that moves of the subject of its thoughts. In con- him. Each idea is an effect, but howsequence of these gratuitous supposi- ever difficult it may be to recur to the tions, which it is only requisite to ex-cause, can we possibly suppose it is pose in order to confute, some very able speculators, who were prepossessed by their superstitious prejudices, have ventured the length to assert, that, without model, without prototype, to act on the senses, the soul is competent * Some ancient philosophers have held, that the soul originally contains the principles of several notions or doctrines: the Stoics designated this by the term Пpoans, anticipated opinions; the Greek mathematicians Kowas Evvoas, universal ideas. The Jews have a similar doctrine which they borrowed from the Chaldeans; their Rabbins taught that each soul, before it was united to the seed that must form an infant in the womb of a woman, is confided to the care of an angel, which causes him to behold heaven, earth, and hell: this, they pretend, is done by the assistance of a lamp which extinguishes itself, as soon as the infant comes into the world. See Gaulmin. De vita et morte Mosis. To justify such monstrous opinions, they assert that ideas are only the objects of thought. But according to the last analysis, these ideas can only reach man from exterior objects, which in giving impulse to his senses, modify his brain; or from the material beings not ascribable to a cause? If we can only form ideas of material substances, + Extravagant as this doctrine of the bishop of Cloyne may appear, it cannot well be more so than that of Malebranche, the champion of innate ideas, who makes the divinity the common bond between the soul and the body: or than that of those metaphysicians who maintain, that the soul is a substance heterogeneous to the body, and, who, by ascribing to this soul the thoughts of man, have, in fact, rendered the body superfluous. They have not perceived, they were liable to one solid objection, which is, that if the ideas of man are innate, if he derives them from a superior being, independent of exterior causes, if he sees every thing in God; how comes it that so many false ideas are afloat, that so many errours prevail with which the human mind is saturated? From whence come those opinions which, according to the theologians, are so displeasing to God? Might it not be a question to the Malebranchists, was it in the Divinity that Spinosa beheld his system? how can we suppose the cause of our ideas can possibly be immaterial? To pretend that man, without the aid of exterior objects, without the intervention of his senses, is competent to form ideas of the universe, is to assert, that a blind man is in a capacity to form a true idea of a picture that represents some fact of which he has never heard any one speak. It is very easy to perceive the source of those errours into which men, otherwise extremely profound and very enlightened, have fallen, when they have been desirous to speak of the soul and of its operations. Obliged, either by their own prejudices, or by the fear of combating the opinions of an imperious theology, they have become the advocates of the principle, that the soul was a pure spirit, an immaterial substance, of an essence directly different from that of the body, or from every thing we behold: this granted, they have been incompetent to conceive how material objects could operate, or in what manner gross and corporeal organs were enabled to act on a substance that had no kind of analogy with them, and how they were in a capacity to modify it by conveying it ideas; in the impossibility of explaining this phenomenon, at the same time perceiving that the soul had ideas, they concluded that it must draw them from itself, and not from those beings, which according to their own hypothesis, were incapable of acting on it; they therefore imagined that all the modifications of this soul, sprung from its own peculiar energy, were imprinted on it from its first formation by the author of nature -an immaterial being like itself; and that these did not in any manner depend upon the beings of which we have a knowledge, or which act upon it by the gross means of our senses. influence upon his body. But if a little reflection be called in, the solution to this difficulty will be found: it will be perceived, that, even during sleep, his brain is supplied with a multitude of ideas, with which the eve or time before has stocked it; these ideas were communicated to it by exterior and corporeal objects, by which it has been modified: it will be found that these modifications renew themselves, not by any spontaneous or voluntary motion on its part, but by a chain of involuntary movements which take place in his machine, which determine or excite those that give play to the brain; these modifications renew themselves with more or less fidelity, with a greater or lesser degree of conformity to those which it has anteriorly experienced. Sometimes in dreaming he has memory, then he retraces to himself the objects which have struck him faithfully; at other times, these modifications renew themselves without order, without connexion, or very differently from those which real objects have before excited in his interior organ. If in a dream he believe he sees a friend, his brain renews in itself the modifications or the ideas which this friend had formerly excited, in the same order that they arranged themselves when his eyes really beheld him; this is nothing more than an effect of memory. If, in his dream, he fancy he sees a monster which has no model in nature, his brain is then modified in the same manner that it was by the particular or detached ideas with which it then does nothing more than compose an ideal whole, by assembling and associating, in a ridiculous manner, the scattered ideas that were consigned to its keeping; it is then, that in dreaming he has imagination. Those dreams that are troublesome, There are, however, some phenom- extravagant, whimsical, or unconnectena which, considered superficially, ed, are commonly the effect of some appear to support the opinion of these confusion in his machine; such as philosophers, and to announce a facul- painful indigestion, an overheated ty in the human soul of producing ideas blood, a prejudicial fermentation, &c. within itself, without any exterior aid; these material causes excite in his these are dreams, in which the interior organ of man, deprived of objects that move it visibly, does not, however, cease to have ideas, to be set in activity, and to be modified in a manner that is sufficiently sensible to have an body a disorderly motion, which precludes the brain from being modified in the same manner it was on the day before; in consequence of this irregular motion, the brain is disturbed, it only represents to itself confused ideas that want connexion. When in a a stranger; they are these objects, who are the true models or archetypes to which it is necessary to recur: here is the source of their errours. dream he believes he sees a sphinx,* either he has seen the representation of one when he was awake, or else the disorderly motion of the brain is such, that it causes it to combine ideas, to connect parts, from which there results a whole without model, of which the parts were not formed to be united. It is thus, that his brain combines the head of a woman, of which it already has the idea, with the body of a lioness, of which it also has the image. In this his head acts in the same manner as when, by any defect in the interior organ, his disordered imagination paints to him some objects, notwithstanding he is awake. He frequently dreams without being asleep: his dreams never produce any thing so strange but that they have some resemblance with the objects which have anteriorly acted on his senses, or have already communicated ideas to his brain. The crafty theologians have composed at their leisure, and in their waking hours, those phantoms of which they avail themselves to terrify man; they have done nothing more than assemble the scattered traits which they have found in the most terrible beings of their own species; by exaggerating the powers and the rights claimed by tyrants, they have formed Gods before whom man trembles. Thus it is seen that dreams, far from proving that the soul acts by its own peculiar energy, or draws its ideas from its own recesses, prove, on the contrary, that in sleep it is entirely passive, that it does not even renew its modifications, but according to the involuntary confusion, which physical causes produce in the body, of which every thing tends to show the identity and the consubstantiality with the soul. What appears to have led those into a mistake, who maintained that the soul drew its ideas from itself, is this, they have contemplated these ideas as if they were real beings, when, in point of fact, they are nothing more than the modifications produced in the brain of man by objects to which this brain is * A being supposed by the poets to have a head and face like a woman, a body like a dog, wings like a bird, and claws like a lion, who put forth riddles and killed those who could not expound them. In the individual who dreams, the soul does not act more from itself than it does in the man who is drunk, that is to say, who is modified by some spirituous liquor; or than it does in the sick man when he is delirious, that is to say, when he is modified by those physical causes which disturb his machine in the performance of its functions; or than it does in him whose brain is disordered: dreams, like these various states, announce nothing more than a physical confusion in the human machine, under the influence of which the brain ceases to act after a precise and regular manner: this disorder may be traced to physical causes, such as the aliments, the humours, the combinations, the fermentations, which are but little analogous to the salutary state of man; from which it will appear, that his brain is necessarily confused whenever his body is agitated in an extraordinary manner. Do not let him, therefore, believe that his soul acts by itself, or without a cause, in any one moment of his existence; it is, conjointly with the body, submitted to the impulse of beings who act on him necessarily, and according to their various properties. Wine, taken in too great a quantity, necessarily disturbs his ideas, causes confusion in his corporeal functions, occasions disorder in his mental faculties. If there really existed a being in nature with the capability of moving itself by its own peculiar energies, that is to say, able to produce motion independent of all other causes, such a being would have the power of arresting itself, or of suspending the motion of the universe, which is nothing more than an immense chain of causes linked one to the other, acting and reacting by necessary and by immutable laws, which cannot be changed or suspended, unless the essences of every thing in it were changed-nay, annihilated. In the general system of the world, nothing more can be perceived than a long series of motion, received and communicated in succession by beings capacitated to give impulse to each other: it is thus that each body is moved, by the collision |