ce, or that habit of mind which makes right as such seem
preferable to wrong? Clearly these are all entirely separate topics. Yet
Holbach, it is obvious, had not divided them in his own mind, and he
seems to think that one and the same answer will serve for what he
mistook for one and the same question. He found it enough to say that
every individual wishes to be happy, and that he cannot be happy unless
he is on good terms with his neighbours; this reciprocity of needs and
services he called the basis of morals. For a rough and common-sense
view of the matter, such as Holbach sought to impress on his readers,
this perhaps will do very well; but it is not the product of accurate
and scientific thinking.

It is not necessary, again, to point out how Holbach, while expounding
the System of Nature, left out of sight the great natural process by
which the moral acquisition of one generation becomes the starting-point
of further acquisitions in the next. He forgot the stages. He talks of
Man as if all the races and eras of man were alike, and also as if each
individual deliberately worked out sums in happiness on his own
account. It would not only have been more true, according to modern
opinions, but more in accordance with Holbach's own view of necessity,
and of the irremovable chain that binds a man's conduct fast to a series
of conditions that existed before he was born, if he had recognised
conscience, moral preferences, interest in the public good, and all that
he called the basis of morals, as coming to a man with the rest of the
apparatus that the past imposes on the present, and not as due to any
process of personal calculation.

Holbach had not clearly thought out the growth, the changes, varieties,
and transformations among moral ideals. He was, of course, far too much
in the full current of the eighteenth century not to feel that
exultation in life and its most exuberant manifestations, which the
conventional moralists of the theological schools had set down and
proscribed as worldliness and fleshliness. "_Action_," he says in this
very chapter; "_action is the true element of the human mind_; no sooner
does man cease to act, than he falls into pain and weariness of spirit."
No doubt this is too absolutely stated, if we are to take some millions
of orientals into our account of the human mind, but it has been true of
the nations of the west. Yet the recognition of this law did not prevent
the writer from occasio