ance, is a
passage which in spite of its inadequateness of expression, contains an
unmistakable germ of true historical appreciation:--"However stupid we
may suppose the Peoples to be, it is certain that, being enlightened by
their interests, it was not without motives that they adopted the
customs that we find established among some of them. The bizarre nature
of these customs is connected, then, with the diversity of interests
among these Peoples. In fact, if they have always understood, in a
confused way, by the name of virtue the desire of public happiness; if
they have in consequence given the name of good to actions that are
useful to the country; and if the idea of utility has always been
privately associated with the idea of virtue, then we may be sure that
their most ridiculous, and even their most cruel, customs have always
had for their foundation the real or seeming utility of the public
good."[129]

[129] _Disc._ ii. 13.

If we contrast this with the universal fashion among Helvetius's
friends, of denouncing the greater portion of the past history of the
race, we cannot but see that, crude as is the language of such a
passage, it contains the all-important doctrine which Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Diderot alike ignored, that the phenomena of the conduct
of mankind, even in its most barbarous phases, are capable of an
intelligible explanation, in terms of motive that shall be related to
their intellectual forms, exactly as the motives of the most polished
society are related to the intellectual forms of such a society. There
are not many passages in all the scores of volumes written in France in
the eighteenth century on the origin of society where there is such an
approach as this to the modern view.

Helvetius's position was that of a man searching for a new basis for
morals. It was hardly possible for any one in that century to look to
religion for such a base, and least of all was it possible to Helvetius.
"It is fanaticism," he says in an elaborately wrought passage, "that
puts arms into the hands of Christian princes; it orders Catholics to
massacre heretics; it brings out upon the earth again those tortures
that were invented by such monsters as Phalaris, as Busiris, as Nero; in
Spain it piles and lights up the fires of the Inquisition, while the
pious Spaniards leave their ports and sail across distant seas, to plant
the Cross and spread desolation in America. Turn your eyes to north or
south, t