organs lie also the conditions and qualities of moral conduct. Freedom of will is a delusion. Diderot approves the ethics of Epicurus, and the Hobbean view of natural right, though not of society, for he maintains that laws are for the good of all, not of one alone. Beauty, says Diderot, is relative to us, but is an object of thought, and not of sensation. Our ideas of beauty (i. e., order, arrangement, proportion, harmony) arise to us from our needs and the natural exercise of our faculties. By means of the standard thus gained we judge of the beauty of beings surrounding us. § 88. Julien Offray de Lamettrie (1709-1752). — Lamettrie, after a thorough early training, took courses in medicine at the universities of Rheims and Leyden. At the latter university he heard the celebrated Boerhaave. He entered the army in the capacity of a physician, and while sick with fever, or at least in consequence of observations he made upon his mental, in connection with his bodily, condition during the illness, conceived the idea of explaining all thought as a consequence of bodily organization, and wrote a treatise embodying and developing the idea. The treatise provoked hostile criticism, and he wrote others in reply to critics. His opinions caused his exile from France, and even from Holland. He took refuge with Frederick the Great, with whom he lived in greatest intimacy, and by whom he was made member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Works. Of Lamettrie's numerous works, the most important are: "Histoire Naturelle de l'Âme" (1745), "L'Homme-Machine " (1748). Others are "L'Homme Plante” (1748). "Discours sur le Bonheur, la Volupté, l'Art de Jouir" (1751). He was formerly supposed to be the author of (D'Holbach's) "Système de la Nature." Philosophy. Matter possesses the power to feel, think, and move. Human thought and will originate in sensation. All memory is explicable by organic or bodily conditions. What we eat and drink determines our thought and action. Physicians, not metaphysicians, are the true philosophers. Happiness depends on sensuous enjoyment. Such enjoyment may be enhanced by reflection: the educated man has higher enjoyment than the ignorant. There is every probability of a Supreme Being, but there is nothing absurd in the idea of an eternal machine. Belief in God is not without real value for mankind, though religion does not necessarily have morality as a consequence. Death is annihilation. Life is a farce. $ 89. Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d'Holbach' (1723-1789). D'Holbach, though a native of Bavaria, was educated, and spent most of his life, in Paris. Inheriting great wealth, he became a generous patron of artists, men of letters, philosophers, and kept open house, as it were, for his learned friends (among whom were Condillac, Helvétius, Diderot, Hume, Turgot, and, for a time, Rousseau), who dubbed him "maître d'hôtel de la philosophie." At his house, dinners were regularly eaten by his friends on Sundays and Thursdays, and at table, political, religious, and philosophical questions were debated. D'Holbach had a varied learning, and was a collaborator on the "Encyclopédie," for which he translated articles from Dutch and German on scientific topics. His personal character seems to have been an unusually attractive one; he was not only hospitable, but remarkable for courtesy, gentleness, modesty, and benevolence. Works. — D'Holbach is now known chiefly by his "Système de la Nature, ou des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral" (1770), which has rightly been called the "Systematic chef-d'œuvre of French Materialism in the Eighteenth Century." Other works of his are "Christianisme dévoilé" (1767), "Le Bon Sens, ou Idées naturelles opposées aux Idées surnaturelles" (1772), "Système Social, 1 Noack; D'Holbach, "System of Nature" (trans.). ou Principes Naturels de Morale et de la Politique" (1773), aims to lay down a system of morals and politics independent of religious systems. Philosophy. Though man imagines a realm of existence beyond nature, there is nothing for him outside nature, nature is the all. Nature shows us nothing but matter and motion. Motion, like extension, is contained immediately in the notion of matter, the sole existent. Motion is universal, there is no rest. All particular motions are communicated motions, there is no independent motion. By means of motion of various kinds all particular things originate from matter. These motions are governed by unchangeable laws, fundamental among which are those of attraction and repulsion, "sympathy" and "antipathy," "love" and "hate,” — in a word, the law that everything seeks itself: the law of gravitation in the physical world, the law of self-love in the moral. Man is a part of nature: he is a material being purely. He experiences an external and an internal motion, and imagines that he has not only a natural body, but also an immaterial soul. But all mental activity is only movement in the brain, a function of the brain. An immaterial being could not feel nor think. There is no free activity, — all feeling, thought, willing, are ceaselessly subject to necessity. To be free, man must be stronger than nature, or outside nature. Mechanism everywhere rules in nature, and the law of the mechanical association of ideas explains all supposed freedom. We suppose ourselves free because we are not conscious of our real motives. The ideas of merit and guilt, reward and punishment, have meaning through the fact (and only through it) that they help to control passion. The soul is inseparable from the body, is born, changes, and dies with it: life, the condition of the soul's existence, is merely the sum of bodily motions, and ceases when those motions cease. Immortality, then, is a delusive idea. But the fear of death is irrational : death is but sleep. The loss of the idea of heavenly immortality is compensated for, in a practical regard, by the idea of an immortality upon earth in the minds and lives of men. The appeals of priesthood to the ecclesi- . astical idea of immortality as a moral motive may be replaced by the appeal to the idea of immortality in the visible world. Animated by this idea, men would not be subject to the fear of death, and would live lives of helpfulness to their fellow-men. To contribute to the happiness of our fellow-men is to be truly useful. Utility is the criterion of morality. All men desire happiness: every one seeks his own self-love is the fundamental law of morals. The idea of God is a superstitious offspring of ignorance, unrest, unhappiness. Men need the word "God" only to designate unknown causes. The idea of God, like that of the soul, is a consequence of the error of mentally separating soul and body, spirit and matter. It is purely negative, and useless. The world needed no creator: the attributes of the uncreated indestructible elements are adequate to its production. If there were a God, where should he be located? If in nature, he would be merely matter or motion; if outside nature, he would be immaterial, and would have no place. The idea of God is not merely useless, it is chimerical, absurd, the cause of all evil in society. -The doctrine of D'Holbach is the purest expression of materialism in modern philosophy, and the last word on the subject. § 90. Pierre Jean Cabanis1 (1757-1808). - Cabanis studied with priests at Cosnac (his birthplace); he studied also at the College of Brives, and at Paris. Though for some years student and professor of belles-lettres (and ambitious of literary distinction), he turned to the study of medicine, took his degree in 1783, became professor of hygiene in a school in Paris, administrator of hospitals, and lecturer in the National Institute. During the period of the Revolution he was closely associated with Mirabeau, labored toNoack; "Rapports du Physique et du Moral," etc. 1 gether with him for the cause of public education, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He was at one time member of the Council of Five Hundred and of the Senate. Among his friends were, besides Mirabeau, Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, Condillac, Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson. Works. Cabanis' philosophical works are a series of memorials, published first (1802) under the title "Traité du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme," again (1805) under the title, "Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme." Philosophy. All knowledge, says Cabanis, is knowledge of phenomena. So-called first, or metaphysical, causes, are beyond our ken. All mental or psychical phenomena must be referred to the bodily organization as their sole cause: the mental (or moral) is only the physical considered under certain particular points of view: psychology is but an aspect of physiology. Living or animate nature is distinguished from non-living or inanimate nature by the universal characteristic of sensibility, or the capacity to feel. But there forces itself upon us the "conjecture that between animal sensibility, on the one hand, and plant impulse, and even elective affinity and attraction of gravitation, on the other, there is an analogy; that vegetable impulses, chemical attraction, universal gravitation, are a sort of instinct which, though varying and indefinite in the lower stages, develops more and more in the following, and exhibits in the higher a suggestion of will and inclination." Sensibility, then, must be regarded as of physical origin and principle. There may be sensibility without the consciousness of it, or without sensation. Sensibility arrives at consciousness in the brain, the function of which is to "think" (to work over the nervous impressions received from without), as that of the stomach is to digest; to "secrete thought," as that of the liver is to "secrete bile." But even when unconscious it may be the determining condition of movement. It is excited to activity by impressions from without: these impressions are |