a most unflinching exposure of the inconsistency with
all that we know of nature, of the mysterious theory of Free Will. This
remains one of the most effective parts of the book, and perhaps the
work has never been done with a firmer hand. The conclusion is
expressed with a decisiveness that almost seems crude. There is declared
to be no difference between a man who throws himself out of the window
and the man whom I throw out, except this, that the impulse acting on
the second comes from without, and that the impulse determining the fall
of the first comes from within his own mechanism. You have only to get
down to the motive, and you will invariably find that the motive is
beyond the actor's own power or reach. The inexorable logic with which
the author presses the Free-Willer from one retreat to another, and from
shift to shift, leaves his adversary at last exactly as naked and
defenceless before Holbach's vigorous and thoroughly realised Naturalism
as the same adversary must always be before Jonathan Edwards's vigorous
theism. "The system of man's liberty," Holbach says (II. ii.), with some
pungency, "seems only to have been invented in order to put him in a
position to offend his God, and so to justify God in all the evil that
he inflicted on man, for having used the freedom which was so
disastrously conferred upon him."

If man be not free, what right have we to punish those who cannot help
committing bad actions, or to reward others who cannot help committing
good actions? Holbach gives to this and the various other ways of
describing fatalism as dangerous to society, the proper and perfectly
adequate answer. He turns to the quality of the action, and connects
with that the social attitude of praise and blame. Merit and demerit
are associated with conduct, according as it is thought to affect the
common welfare advantageously or the reverse. My indignation and my
approval are as necessary as the acts that excite these sentiments. My
feelings are neither more nor less spontaneous than the deciding motives
of the actor. Whatever be the necessitating cause of our actions, I have
a right to do my best by praise and blame, by reward and punishment, to
strengthen or to weaken, to prolong or to divert, the motives that are
the antecedents of the action; exactly as I have a right to dam up a
stream, or to divert its course, or otherwise deal with it to suit my
own convenience. Penal laws, for instance, are ways of offerin