o east or west; on every side you see the consecrated knife of
Religion raised against the breasts of women, of children, of old men,
and the earth all smoking with the blood of victims immolated to false
gods or to the Supreme Being, and presenting one vast, sickening,
horrible charnel-house of intolerance. Now what virtuous man, what
Christian, if his tender soul is filled with the divine unction that
exhales from the maxims of the Gospel, if he is sensible of the cries of
the unhappy and the outcast, and has sometimes wiped away their
tears--what man could fail at such a sight to be touched with compassion
for humanity, and would not use all his endeavour to found probity, not
on principles so worthy of respect as those of religion, but on
principles less easily abused, such as those of personal interest would
be?"[130]

[130] _Disc._ ii. 24.

This, then, is the point best worth seizing in a criticism of Helvetius.
The direction of morality by religion had proved a failure. Helvetius,
as the organ of reaction against asceticism and against mysticism,
appealed to positive experience, and to men's innate tendency to seek
what is pleasurable and to avoid what is painful. The scientific
imperfection of his attempt is plain; but that, at any rate, is what the
attempt signified in his own mind.

The same feeling for social reform inspired the second great paradox of
_L'Esprit_. This is to the effect that of all the sources of
intellectual difference between one man and another, organisation is the
least influential. Intellectual differences are due to diversity of
circumstance and to variety in education. It is not felicity of
organisation that makes a great man. There is nobody, in whom passion,
interest, education, and favourable chance, could not have surmounted
all the obstacles of an unpromising nature; and there is no great man
who, in the absence of passion, interest, education, and certain
chances, would not have been a blockhead, in spite of his happier
organisation. It is only in the moral region that we ought to seek the
true cause of inequality of intellect. Genius is no singular gift of
nature. Genius is common; it is only the circumstances proper to develop
it that are rare. The man of genius is simply the product of the
circumstances in which he is placed. The inequality in intelligence
(_esprit_) that we observe among men, depends on the government under
which they live, on the times in which their d