by Will Durant
Having so stated his program, d’Holbach proceeds systematically to reject all supernatural beings and considerations; to accept nature with all its beauty, cruelty, limitation, and possibilities; to reduce all reality to matter and motion; and to build upon this materialistic basis a system of morality which he hopes would be capable of transforming savages into citizens, of forming individual character and social order, and of giving a reasonable happiness even to a life inevitably destined to death.
He begins and ends with nature, but he disclaims any attempt to personify it; he defines it as “the great whole that results from the assemblage of matter under its various combinations”; it is d’Holbach’s affectionate name for the universe. Matter he defines cautiously as “in general all that affects our senses in any fashion whatever.”
Everything in the universe is in motion; the essence of matter is to act; if we consider it attentively, we shall discover that no particle of it enjoys absolute repose.… All that appears to us to be at rest does not remain even for one instant in the same state. All beings are continually breeding, increasing, decreasing, and dispersing.… The hardest stones, by degrees, give way to the touch of air.107
The whole offers to our contemplation “nothing but an immense, uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.”108 The more our knowledge grows, the more overwhelming is the evidence that the universe acts only through natural causes. It may be difficult to understand how “inanimate matter can pass into life,” but it is even more difficult to believe that life is a special creation of some mysterious entity external to the material universe. It is difficult to understand how matter can come to feel, but other properties of matter, like “gravity, magnetism, elasticity, electricity,” are “not less inexplicable than feeling.”109
Man too is “a being purely physical,” subject to the same laws that govern the rest of the world. How could a physical body and an immaterial mind act upon each other? The “soul” is merely the total organization and activity of the body, and can have no separate existence. “To say that the soul will feel, think, enjoy, and suffer after the death of the body is to pretend that a clock shivered into a thousand pieces will continue to strike the hour … and mark the progress of time.”110 The conception of mind and soul as immaterial entities has retarded our treatment of mental diseases; when we consider mind as a function of the body we enable medical science to cure many mental disorders by attacking their physical causes.I111
Being a function of the body, mind is subject to the universal rule of natural causes and effects. Chapter XI of the Système is the most eloquent defense of determinism in all the range of French philosophy:
Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his being able to swerve from it even for an instant. He is born without his consent; his organization in no wise depends upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them. He is unceasingly modified by causes, visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give a color to his thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will counting for anything in these various states.113
This determinism seems to imply fatalism, and d’Holbach, unlike most determinists, frankly accepts the implication. The condition of the universe at any moment is determined by its condition at the preceding moment, and this was determined by its predecessor, and so on as far in the past as you like, so that any moment in the history of the universe may be taken as determining all later moments, as far in the future as you like. This apparent subjection of man—of every genius or saint in every conception or prayer—to some primeval gas does not deter d’Holbach; he accepts his fate with stoic pride:
Man is the work of Nature; he exists in Nature; he is submitted to her laws. He cannot deliver himself from them, nor can he step beyond them, even in thought.… Instead, therefore, of seeking outside the world.… for beings who can procure him a happiness denied him by Nature, let man study this Nature, let him learn her laws, contemplate her forces, observe the immutable rules by which she acts; let him apply these discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to her mandates, which nothing can alter; let him cheerfully consent to ignore causes hidden from him by an impenetrable veil; let him without murmuring yield to the decrees of a universal necessity which can never be brought within his comprehension, nor ever emancipate him from those laws that are imposed upon him by his essence.114
Does this fatalism warrant us in concluding that there is no use in our trying to avoid evil, dishonor, sickness, or death, and that we may as well cease all effort, all ambition or aspiration, and let events take their course? D’Holbach replies that even here we have no choice: heredity and environment have already determined whether we shall subside into apathy or respond actively to the needs and challenges of life. And he anticipates the objection that determinism, by appearing to excuse crime, may increase it. Determinism does not suggest that crime should not be punished; on the contrary it will lead the legislator, the teacher, and public opinion to provide, by laws or morals, better deterrents to crime and more inducements to social behavior; these deterrents and inducements will enter into the environmental factors molding the conduct of men. But determinism does warrant us in considering crime, and all unsocial behavior, as a mental imbalance due to heredity, environment, or circumstance; therefore we must deal with such behavior as we treat disease; we must abandon the use of torture and extreme penalties, for these increase the opposition between the individual and society, and accustom people to violence and cruelty rather than deter them from crime.
In this philosophy, of course, there is no room for God. D’Holbach’s unflagging antipathy, not only to theism but to deism and pantheism as well, led his contemporaries to call him “the personal enemy of the Al-mighty.”115 “If we go back to the beginning we can always find that ignorance and fear have created gods; fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit has adorned or disfigured them; weakness worships them, credulity keeps them alive, custom respects them, tyranny supports them to … serve its own ends.”116 He raises against theism all the old arguments, and grows as hot as Helvétius against the Biblical conception of God.117 The majestic order and regularity of the universe do not suggest to him any supreme intelligence; they are due to natural causes operating mechanically, and require no attribution to a deity who would himself be more inexplicable than the world. Order and disorder, like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, are subjective conceptions, derived from the pleasure or displeasure that our perceptions give us; but man is not “the measure of all things”; his satisfactions are no objective standard to apply to the universe; Nature proceeds without regard to what we, from our infinitesimal point in space, consider good or bad, ugly or beautiful. From the point of view of the whole “there is no such thing as real evil. Insects find a safe retreat in the ruins of the palace that crushes men in its fall.”118 We must learn to regard Nature, with her sublimities and catastrophes, as imperturbably neutral.
All that has been said in the course of this work proves clearly that everything is necessary, that everything is always in order relative to Nature, where all beings do nothing more than follow the laws that are imposed on their respective classes.… Nature distributes with the same hand that which is called order and that which is called disorder, that which is called pleasure and that which is called pain; in short she diffuses, by the necessity of her existence, both evil and good.… Let not man, therefore, either praise her bounty or tax her with malice; let him not imagine that his vociferations or supplications can ever arrest her colossal power, always acting after immutable laws.… When he suffers let him not seek a remedy by recurring to chimeras that his own distempered imagination has created; let him draw from the stores of Nature the remedies which she offers for the evils she brings upon him; let him
search in her bosom for those salutary productions to which she has given birth.119
D’Holbach comes close to reintroducing God in the form of Nature. After vowing not to personify it he tends to deify her, speaks of her omnipotence, her will, her plan, her bounty; he thinks of her as man’s best guide, and lets Diderot (?) write a sophomoric apostrophe to her as the concluding paragraph of a powerful book: “O Nature, sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, Virtue, Reason, and Truth, remain forever our only divinities! It is to you that belong the praises of the human race; to you appertains the homage of the earth,” and so on. Such pantheistic piety is hardly in key with d’Holbach’s view of nature as handing out good and evil impartially: “Winds, tempests, hurricanes, volcanoes, wars, plagues, famine, diseases, death are as necessary to her eternal march as the [not everywhere!] beneficent heat of the sun.”120 We are reminded of Calvin’s God, stingy with heaven and lavish of hell.
In his characteristic mood d’Holbach repudiates not only the idea of God but the very word. “The words God and create. . . ought to be banished from the language of all those who desire to speak to be understood. These are abstract words, invented by ignorance; they are only calculated to satisfy men lacking in experience, men too idle or too timid to study nature and its ways.”121 He rejects deism as a compromise with superstition,122 and makes a veritable religion of atheism:
The friend of mankind cannot be a friend of God, who at all times has been a real scourge to the earth. The apostle of nature will not be the instrument of deceitful chimeras, by which the world is made an abode of illusions; the adorer of truth will not compromise with falsehood.… He knows that the happiness of the human race imperiously exacts that the dark, unsteady edifice of superstition shall be razed to its foundations, in order to elevate on its ruins a temple to nature suitable to peace—a fane sacred to virtue.… If his efforts should be in vain; if he cannot inspire with courage beings too much accustomed to tremble, he will at least applaud himself for having dared the attempt. Nevertheless he will not judge his efforts fruitless if he has been able to make only a single mortal happy, if his principles have calmed the transports of one honest mind.… At least he will have the advantage of having banished from his own mind the importunate terror of superstition, … of having trodden underfoot those chimeras with which the unfortunate are tormented. Thus, escaped from the peril of the storm, he will calmly contemplate, from the summit of his rock, those tremendous hurricanes which superstition excites; and he will hold forth a succoring hand to those who shall be willing to accept it.123
3. Morals and the State
But is atheism compatible with popular morality? Can the powerful egoistic impulses of common men be controlled by a moral code shorn of all religious devotion and support? D’Holbach faced this question in the Système de la nature, and returned to it in 1776 with a three-volume Morale universelle. First of all, he doubts if religion, all in all, has made for morality:
In spite of a hell so horrid even in description, what crowds of abandoned criminals fill our cities! … Are condemned thieves and murderers either atheists or skeptics? Those wretches believe in a God … Does the most religious father, in advising his son, speak to him of a vindictive God? … His constitution destroyed by debauchery, his fortune ruined by gambling, the contempt of society—these are the motives that the father employs.124
And even supposing that religion sometimes helps morality, does this balance the harm that religion causes?
Against one timid man whom this idea [of hell] restrains, there are thousands upon whom it operates to no effect; there are millions whom it makes irrational, whom it turns into savage persecutors, whom it converts into wicked … fanatics; there are millions whose minds it disturbs, and whom it diverts from their duty to society.125
And consider the hypocrisy forced upon skeptics by the social pressure of religion:
Those who wish to form an idea of the shackles imposed by theology upon the genius of philosophers born under the “Christian Dispensation,” let them read the metaphysical romances of Leibniz, Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, etc., and coolly examine the ingenious but rhapsodical systems entitled “the pre-established harmony” of “occasional causes.”126
Moreover, by concentrating human thought upon individual salvation in another world, Christianity deadened civic feeling in this one, leaving men insensitive to the misery of their fellows, and to the injustices committed by oppressive groups and governments.
D’Holbach rejects the Christian-Voltairean idea that man is born with a sense of right and wrong. Conscience is the voice not of God but of the policeman; it is the deposit of a thousand exhortations, commands, and reproofs falling upon the individual in his growth. “We may define conscience as our knowledge of the effects which our actions produce upon our fellow men, and, in reaction, upon ourselves.”127 Such conscience can be a false guide, for it may have been formed by a slanted education, by misunderstood experience, by erroneous reasoning, or by a corrupt public opinion. There is no vice or crime that cannot be made to seem a virtue by indoctrination or evil example; so adultery, however forbidden by religion, has become a proud achievement, sycophancy is de rigueur at court, rape and rapine, among soldiers, are considered legitimate rewards of risking life and limb. “We see rich men who suffer no pricks of conscience over wealth acquired at the expense of their fellow citizens,” and “zealots whose conscience, blinded by false ideas, … urges them to exterminate without remorse those who have different opinions than their own.” The best that we can hope for is a conscience formed by a better education, by an acquired habit of looking forward to the effects of our actions upon others and ourselves, and by a healthier public opinion which an intelligent individual will hesitate to offend.128
D’Holbach agrees with Christianity that man is by nature inclined to “sin”—i.e., to behavior injurious to the group; but he rejects as ridiculous the notion that this “sinful nature” is an inheritance from the “sin of our first parents.” He accepts egoism as fundamental in human conduct, and, like Helvétius, he proposes to found his moral code upon it by making social behavior advantageous to the individual. “Morals would be a vain science if it did not incontestably prove to man that his interest consists in being virtuous.”129 Something can be achieved by an education that explains the dependence of individual welfare upon the welfare of the group, and a considerable degree of “altruism” can be evoked by appealing to the natural desire for social approval, distinction, and rewards. So d’Holbach formulates his ethic as “the Code of Nature”:
Live for yourself and your fellow creature. I [Nature] approve of your pleasures while they injure neither you nor others, whom I have rendered necessary to your happiness.… Be just, since justice supports the human race. Be good, since your goodness will attract every heart to you. Be indulgent, since you live among beings weak like yourself. Be modest, as your pride will hurt the self-love of everyone around you. Pardon injuries, do good to him who injures you, that you may … gain his friendship. Be moderate, temperate, and chaste, since lechery, intemperance, and excess will destroy you and make you contemptible.130
If government cared more actively for the health, protection, and education of the people, there would be far less crime;131 when one has much to lose he does not readily risk it in unsocial conduct. If education trained pupils to reason, instead of frightening them with irrational beliefs that soon lose their force, men would be morally improved by increased ability to apply experience to action, foreseeing, in the light of the past, the future effects of present deeds. In the long run intelligence is the highest virtue, and such virtue is the best road to happiness.
In Système de la nature, Système social (1772, three volumes), Politique naturelle (1772, two volumes), and Éthocratie (1776) the indefatigable millionaire took up the problems of society and government. In these books the attack passes from the Church to the state. D’Holbach agrees with Locke and Marx that labor is t
he source of all wealth, but, like Locke, he justifies private property as the right of a man to the product of his labor. Himself a noble, he would do away with hereditary aristocracy:
A body of men that can lay claim to wealth and honor solely though the title of birth must of necessity serve as a discouragement to the other classes of citizens. Those who have only ancestors have no right to reward.… Hereditary nobility can only be regarded as a pernicious abuse, fit only for favoring the indolence … and incompetence of one class to the detriment of all.132 … Old title deeds, ancient documents, preserved in medieval castles—are they to confer upon their inheritors a claim to the most exalted posts in Church and state, in the courts of justice, or in the army, regardless of whether these inheritors possess the talents necessary for the proper accomplishment of such duties?133
As for the clergy, let them shift for themselves. Church and state should be strictly separate; religious groups should be treated as voluntary associations, enjoying toleration but no state support; and a wise government will prevent any one religion from intolerance or persecution.134
Himself a rentier, d’Holbach criticizes the idle rentiers of the middle class, and he has a baron’s scorn of businessmen. “There is no more dangerous creature alive then the businessman seeking his prey.”135 The greed of commerce is now replacing dynastic ambitions as a cause of war:
States are ready to cut each other’s throats [for] some heaps of sand. Entire nations become the dupes of avaricious businessmen, who beguile them with the hope of wealth, the fruit of which they gather only for themselves. Countries are depopulated, taxation is piled up, peoples are impoverished, to satisfy the greed of a small group.