at it should be this,
and accordingly he stuffed it with stories and anecdotes. Many of them
are very poor, many are inapposite, some are not very decent, others are
spoiled in telling, but still stories and anecdotes they remain, and
they carry a light-minded reader more or less easily from page to page
and chapter to chapter. But an ingenuous student of ethics who should
take Helvetius seriously, could hardly be reconciled by lively anecdotes
to what, in his particular formula, seems a most depressing doctrine.
Madame Roland read the celebrated book in her romantic girlhood, and her
impression may be taken for that of most generous natures. "Helvetius
made me wretched: he annihilated the most ravishing illusions; he showed
me everywhere repulsive self-interest. Yet what sagacity!" she
continues. "I persuaded myself that Helvetius painted men such as they
had become in the corruption of society: I judged that it was good to
feed one's self on such an author, in order to be able to frequent what
is called the world, without being its dupe. But I took good care not to
adopt his principles, merely in order to know man properly so-called. I
felt myself capable of a generosity which he never recognises. With what
delight I confronted his theories with the great traits in history, and
the virtues of the heroes that history has immortalised."[114]

[113] Burton, ii. 57.

[114] _Oeuv. de Mdme. Roland_, i. 108.

We have ventured to say that _L'Esprit_ contained the one principle
capable of supplying such a system of thinking about society as would
have taught the French of that time in what direction to look for
reforms. There is probably no instance in literature of a writer coming
so close to a decisive body of salutary truth, and then losing himself
in the by-ways of the most repulsive paradox that a perverse ingenuity
could devise. We are able to measure how grievous was this miscarriage
by reflecting that the same instrument which Helvetius actually held in
his hand, but did not know how to use, was taken from him by a man of
genius in another country, and made to produce reforms that saved
England from a convulsion. Nobody pretends that Helvetius discovered
Utilitarianism. Hume's name, for instance, occurs too often in his pages
for even the author himself to have dreamed that his principle of
utility was a new invention of his own. It would, as Mill has said,
imply ignorance of the history of philosophy and of