ess whose absence in the
bulk of the human race he made the fulcrum of his whole moral
system.[128]

[126] _Oeuv._, ii. 270.

[127] _Disc._ ii. 24.

[128] As Mr. Henry Sidgwick has put this:--"Even the indefatigable
patience and inexhaustible ingenuity of Bentham will hardly succeed
in defeating the sinister conspiracy of self-preferences. In fact,
unless a little more sociality is allowed to an average human being,
the problem of combining these egoists into an organisation for
promoting their common happiness, is like the old task of making
ropes of sand. The difficulty that Hobbes vainly tried to settle
summarily by absolute despotism, is hardly to be overcome by the
democratic artifices of his more inventive successor."

Into this field of criticism it is not, I repeat, our present business
minutely to enter. The only question for us, attempting to study the
history of opinion, is what Helvetius meant by his paradoxes, and how
they came into his mind. No serious writer, least of all a Frenchman in
the eighteenth century, ever sets out with anything but such an
intention for good, as is capable of respectable expression. And we ask
ourselves what good end Helvetius proposed to himself. Of what was he
thinking when he perpetrated so singular a misconstruction of his own
meaning as that inversion of beneficence into self-love of which we have
spoken? We can only explain it in one way. In saying that it is
impossible to love good for good's sake, Helvetius was thinking of the
theologians. Their doctrine that man is predisposed to love evil for
evil's sake, removes conduct from the sphere of rational motive, as
evinced in the ordinary course of human experience. Helvetius met this
by contending that both in good and bad conduct men are influenced by
their interest and not by mystic and innate predisposition either to
good or to evil. He sought to bring morals and human conduct out of the
region of arbitrary and superstitious assumption, into the sphere of
observation. He thought he was pursuing a scientific, as opposed to a
theological spirit, by placing interest at the foundation of conduct,
both as matter of fact and of what ought to be the fact, instead of
placing there the love of God, or the action of grace, or the authority
of the Church.

We may even say that Helvetius shows a positive side, which is wanting
in the more imposing names of the century. Here, for inst