ortion as it conduces to our interest.
Friendship, _esprit-de-corps_, patriotism, humanity, are names for
qualities that we prize more or less highly in proportion as they come
more or less close to our own happiness; and the scale of our
preferences is in the inverse ratio of the number of those who benefit
by the given act. If it affects the whole of humanity or of our country,
our approval is less warmly stirred than if it were an act specially
devoted to our own exclusive advantage. If you want therefore to reach
men, and to shape their conduct for the public good, you must affect
them through their pleasures and pains.

To this position, which roused a universal indignation that amazed the
author, there is no doubt a true side. It is worth remembering, for
instance, that all penal legislation, in so far as deterrent and not
merely vindictive, assumes in all who come whether actually or
potentially within its sphere, the very doctrine that covered Helvetius
with odium. And there is more to be said than this. As M. Charles Comte
has expressed it: If the strength with which we resent injury were not
in the ratio of the personal risk that we run, we should hardly have the
means of self-preservation; and if the acts which injure the whole of
humanity gave us pain equal to that of acts that injure us directly, we
should be of all beings the most miserable, for we should be incessantly
tormented by conduct that we should be powerless to turn aside. And
again, if the benefits of which we are personally the object did not
inspire in us a more lively gratitude than those which we spread over
all mankind, we should probably experience few preferences, and extend
few preferences to others, and in that case egoism would grow to its
most overwhelming proportions.[121]

[121] _Traite de Legislation_, i. 243.

This aspect of Helvetius's doctrine, however, is one of those truths
which is only valid when taken in connection with a whole group of
different truths, and it was exactly that way of asserting a position,
in itself neither indefensible nor unmeaning, which left the position
open to irresistible attack. Helvetius's errors had various roots, and
may be set forth in as many ways. The most general account of it is that
even if he had insisted on making Self-love the strongest ingredient in
our judgment of conduct, he ought at least to have given some place to
Sympathy. For, though it is possible to contend that sympathy