erot's article on Suicide
in the Encyclopaedia (_Oeuv._, xvii. 235) contains the usual
arguments of the Church against suicide, with some casuistic
illustrations, but it also contains an account of Dr. Donne's
vindication of Suicide, called _Bia-thanatos_, 1651, in which these
remarks of Holbach occur verbatim. Hallam found Donne's book so dull
and pedantic that he declares no one would be induced to kill
himself by reading such a book unless he were threatened with
another volume.

[155] Hume's suppressed Essay on Suicide (see the edition by Mr.
Green and Mr. Grose, 1875, vol. ii. 405) is a much more exhaustive
argument than Holbach's, though the language of the two pieces is
sometimes curiously alike. Rousseau in this, as in so many other
moralities--marriage, for instance--was on the side of the Church,
only allowing suicide where a man happens to be stricken by a
painful and incurable disease. See the two famous letters in the
_New Heloisa_, Pt. iii. 21, 22.

Holbach has been accused of reducing virtue to a far-sighted
egoism,[156] and detached and crude propositions may be quoted, that
perhaps give a literal warrant for the charge. Nominally he bases
morality on happiness, but his real base is the happiness of the
greatest number. To borrow Mr. Sidgwick's classification, Holbach is a
universalistic and not an egoistic Hedonist. The spirit of what he says
is, in fact, not individualist but social. "The good man is he to whom
true ideas have shown his own interest or his own happiness to lie in
such a way of acting, that others are forced to love and approve for
their own interest.... It is man who is most necessary to the well-being
of man.... Merit and virtue are founded on the nature of man, on his
needs.... It is by virtue that we are able to earn the goodwill, the
confidence, the esteem, of all those with whom we have relations; in a
word, no man can be happy alone.... To be virtuous is to place one's
interest in what accords with the interest of others; it is to enjoy the
benefits and the delights that one is the means of diffusing among
them.... The sentiments of self-love become a hundred times more
delicious when we see them shared by all those with whom our destiny
binds us. The habit of virtue excites wants within us that only virtue
can satisfy; thus it is that virtue is ever its own recompense, and pays
itself with the blessings that it pr