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The System of Nature, Vol. 1

B >> Baron D\'Holbach >> The System of Nature, Vol. 1



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PRODUCTION NOTES: First published in French in 1770 under the
pseudonym of Mirabaud. This e-book based on a facsimile reprint
of an English translation originally published 1820-21.
This e-text covers the first of the original two volumes.




THE SYSTEM OF NATURE
Volume I


Paul Henri Thiery,
Baron d'Holbach


Introduction by
Robert D. Richardson, Jr.




INTRODUCTION


Paul Henri Thiery, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was the center of the
radical wing of the _philosophes_. He was friend, host, and patron to a
wide circle that included Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Hume.
Holbach wrote, translated, edited, and issued a stream of books and
pamphlets, often under other names, that has made him the despair of
bibliographers but has connected his name, by innuendo, gossip, and
association, with most of what was written in defense of atheistic
materialism in late eighteenth-century France.

Holbach is best known for _The System of Nature_ (1770) and deservedly,
since it is a clear and reasonably systematic exposition of his main
ideas. His initial position determines all the rest of his argument.
"There is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes
all beings." Conceiving of nature as strictly limited to matter and
motion, both of which have always existed, he flatly denies that there
is any such thing as spirit or a supernatural. Mythology began, Holbach
claims, when men were still in a state of nature and at the point when
wise, strong, and for the most part benign men were arising as leaders
and lawgivers. These leaders "formed discourses by which they spoke to
the imaginations of their willing auditors," using the medium of poetry,
because it "seem[ed] best adapted to strike the mind." Through poetry,
then, and by means of "its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme,
its harmony... the entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was
personified, by its beautiful allegories." Thus mythology is given an
essentially political origin. These early poets are literally
legislators of mankind. "The first institutors of nations, and their
immediate successors in authority, only spoke to the people by fables,
allegories, enigmas, of which they reserved to themselves the right of
giving an explanation." Holbach is rather condescending about the
process, but since mythology is a representation of nature itself, he is
far more tolerant of mythology than he is of the next step. "Natural
philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians
and theologians," and at this point a fatal error was introduced: the
theologians made a distinction between the power of nature and nature
itself, separated the two, made the power of nature prior to nature, and
called it God. Thus man was left with an abstract and chimerical being
on one side and a despoiled inert nature, destitute of power, on the
other. In Holbach's critique the point at which theology split off from
mythology marks the moment of nature's alienation from itself and paves
the way for man's alienation from nature.

Holbach is thus significant for Romantic interest in myth in two ways.
First, he provides a clear statement of what can be loosely called the
antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of
all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the
Romantic era. Holbach was and is a reminder that the Romantic
affirmation of myth was never easy, uncritical, or unopposed. Any new
endorsement of myth had to be made in the teeth of Holbach and the other
skeptics. The very vigor of the Holbachian critique of myth impelled the
Romantics to think more deeply and defend more carefully any new claim
for myth. Secondly, although Holbach's argument generally drove against
myth and religion both, he did make an important, indeed a saving
distinction between mythology and theology. Mythology is the more or
less harmless personification of the power in and of nature; theology
concerns itself with what for Holbach was the nonexistent power beyond
or behind nature. By exploiting this distinction it would become
possible for a Shelley, for example, to take a strong antitheological--
even an anti-Christian--position without having to abandon myth.

Holbach was one of William Godwin's major sources for his ideas about
political justice, and Shelley, who discussed Holbach with Godwin,
quotes extensively from _The System of Nature_ in _Queen Mab_.
Furthermore, Volney's _Ruins_, another important book for Shelley, is
directly descended from _The System of Nature_. On the other side,
Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe
and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his
work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and
Barlow.

Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former
perpetual secretary to the Académie française who had died ten years
before), _La Système de la nature_ was translated and reprinted
frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint
was the most often reprinted or pirated version in English. A useful
starting point for Holbach's work is Jerome Vercruysse, _Bibliographie
descriptive des écrits du baron d'Holbach_ (Paris, 1971). The difficult
subject of the essentially clandestine evolution of biblical criticism
as an anti-Christian and antimyth critique in the early part of the
eighteenth century, before the well-documented era of the biblical
critic Eichhorn in Germany, is illuminated in Ira Wade, _The Clandestine
Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700-
1750_ (Princeton Univ. Press, 1938).


Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
University of Denver


* * * * *



[Illustration:
Parke sculp't
M. DE MIRABAUD




THE
SYSTEM OF NATURE;
OR,
_THE LAWS_
OF THE
MORAL AND PHYSICAL WORLD.



TRANSLATED
FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH OF
M. DE MIRABAUD



VOL. I.




CONTENTS

Preface


PART I--Laws of Nature.--Of man.--The faculties of the soul.
--Doctrine of immortality.--On happiness.


CHAP. I. Nature and her laws.

CHAP. II. Of motion and its origin.

CHAP. III. Of matter--of its various combinations--of its
diversified motion--or of the course of Nature.

CHAP. IV. Laws of motion common to every being of Nature--
attraction and repulsion--inert force-necessity.

CHAP. V. Order and confusion--intelligence--chance.

CHAP. VI. Moral and physical distinctions of man--his origin.

CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VIII. The intellectual faculties derived from the faculty of
feeling.

CHAP. IX. The diversity of the intellectual faculties; they depend
on physical causes, as do their moral qualities.--The natural
principles of society--morals--politics.

CHAP. X. The soul does not derive its ideas from itself--it has
no innate ideas.

CHAP. XI. Of the system of man's free-agency.

CHAP. XII. An examination of the opinion which pretends that the
system of fatalism is dangerous.

CHAP. XIII. Of the immortality of the soul--of the doctrine of a
future state--of the fear of death.

CHAP. XIV. Education, morals, and the laws suffice to restrain
man--of the desire of immortality--of suicide.

CHAP. XV. Of man's true interest, or of the ideas he forms to
himself of happiness.--Man cannot be happy without virtue.

CHAP. XVI. The errors of man.--Upon what constitutes happiness.--
The true source of his evils.--Remedies that may be applied.

CHAP. XVII. Those ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature,
are the only remedies for the evil of man.--Recapitulation.--
Conclusions of the First Part.




PREFACE

_The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The
pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his
infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent
prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders
him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He
resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a
dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity
obscure, it is vacillating and false:--He takes the tone of his ideas on
the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an
interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these
barriers to the improvement of his condition; to disentangle him from
the clouds of error that envelope him; to guide him out of this Cretan
labyrinth, requires the clue of Ariadne, with all the love she could
bestow on Theseus. It exacts more than common exertion; it needs a most
determined, a most undaunted courage--it is never effected but by a
persevering resolution to act, to think for himself; to examine with
rigour and impartiality the opinions he has adopted. He will find that
the most noxious weeds have sprung up beside beautiful flowers; entwined
themselves around their stems, overshadowed them with an exuberance of
foliage, choaked the ground, enfeebled their growth, diminished their
petals; dimmed the brilliancy of their colours; that deceived by their
apparent freshness of their verdure, by the rapidity of their
exfoliation, he has given them cultivation, watered them, nurtured them,
when he ought to have plucked out their very roots.

Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated
checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the
impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world;
and hunts out misery in imaginary regions. He would be a metaphysician
before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation
of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on
conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis. He dares not cultivate his reason,
because from his earliest days he has been taught to consider it
criminal. He pretends to know his date in the indistinct abodes of
another life, before he has considered of the means by which he is to
render himself happy in the world he inhabits: in short, man disdains
the study of Nature, except it be partially: he pursues phantoms that
resemble an _ignis-fatuus_, which at once dazzle, bewilders, and
affright: like the benighted traveller led astray by these deceptive
exhalations of a swampy soil, he frequently quits the plain, the simple
road of truth, by pursuing of which, he can alone ever reasonably hope
to reach the goal of happiness.

The most important of our duties, then, is to seek means by which we may
destroy delusions that can never do more than mislead us. The remedies
for these evils must be sought for in Nature herself; it is only in the
abundance of her resources, that we can rationally expect to find
antidotes to the mischiefs brought upon us by an ill directed, by an
overpowering enthusiasm. It is time these remedies were sought; it is
time to look the evil boldly in the face, to examine its foundations, to
scrutinize its superstructure: reason, with its faithful guide
experience, must attack in their entrenchments those prejudices, to
which the human race has but too long been the victim. For this purpose
reason must be restored to its proper rank,--it must be rescued from the
evil company with which it is associated. It has been too long degraded
--too long neglected--cowardice has rendered it subservient to delirium,
the slave to falsehood. It must no longer be held down by the massive
claims of ignorant prejudice.

Truth is invariable--it is requisite to man--it can never harm him--his
very necessities, sooner or later, make him sensible of this; oblige him
to acknowledge it. Let us then discover it to mortals--let us exhibit
its charms--let us shed it effulgence over the darkened road; it is the
only mode by which man can become disgusted with that disgraceful
superstition which leads him into error, and which but too often usurps
his homage by treacherously covering itself with the mask of truth--its
lustre can wound none but those enemies to the human race whose power is
bottomed solely on the ignorance, on the darkness in which they have in
almost every claimed contrived to involve the mind of man.

Truth speaks not to those perverse beings:--her voice can only be heard
by generous souls accustomed to reflection, whose sensibilities make
them lament the numberless calamities showered on the earth by political
and religious tyranny--whose enlightened minds contemplate with horror
the immensity, the ponderosity of that series of misfortunes which error
has in all ages overwhelmed mankind.

To error must be attributed those insupportable chains which tyrants,
which priests have forged for most nations. To error must be equally
attributed that abject slavery into which the people of almost every
country have fallen. Nature designed they should pursue their happiness
by the most perfect freedom.--To error must be attributed those
religious terrors which, in almost every climate, have either petrified
man with fear, or caused him to destroy himself for coarse or fanciful
beings. To error must be attributed those inveterate hatreds, those
barbarous persecutions, those numerous massacres, those dreadful
tragedies, of which, under pretext of serving the interests of heaven,
the earth has been but too frequently made the theatre. It is error
consecrated by religious enthusiasm, which produces that ignorance, that
uncertainty in which man ever finds himself with regard to his most
evident duties, his clearest rights, the most demonstrable truths. In
short, man is almost everywhere a poor degraded captive, devoid of
greatness of soul, of reason, or of virtue, whom his inhuman gaolers
have never permitted to see the light of day.

Let us then endeavour to disperse those clouds of ignorance, those mists
of darkness, which impede man on his journey, which obscure his
progress, which prevent his marching through life with a firm, with a
steady grip. Let us try to inspire him with courage--with respect for
his reason--with an inextinguishable love for truth--with a remembrance
of Gallileo--to the end that he may learn to know himself--to know his
legitimate rights--that he may learn to consult his experience, and no
longer be the dupe of an imagination led astray by authority--that he
may renounce the prejudices of his childhood--that he may learn to found
his morals on his nature, on his wants, on the real advantage of
society--that he may dare to love himself--that he may learn to pursue
his true happiness by promoting that of others--in short, that he may no
longer occupy himself with reveries either useless or dangerous--that he
may become a virtuous, a rational being, in which case he cannot fail to
become happy.

If he must have his chimeras, let him at least learn to permit others to
form theirs after their own fashion; since nothing can be more
immaterial than the manner of men's thinking on subjects not accessible
to reason, provided those thoughts be not suffered to embody themselves
into actions injurious to others: above all, let him be fully persuaded
that it is of the utmost importance to the inhabitants of this world to
be JUST, KIND, and PEACEABLE.

Far from injuring the cause of virtue, an impartial examination of the
principles of this work will shew that its object is to restore truth to
its proper temple, to build up an altar whose foundations shall be
consolidated by morality, reason, and justice: from this sacred pane,
virtue guarded by truth, clothed with experience, shall shed forth her
radiance on delighted mortals; whose homage flowing consecutively shall
open to the world a new aera, by rendering general the belief that
happiness, the true end of man's existence, can never be attained but BY
PROMOTING THAT OF HIS FELLOW CREATURE.

In short, man should learn to know, that happiness is simply an
emanative quality formed by reflection; that each individual ought to be
the sun of his own system, continually shedding around him his genial
rays; that these, re-acting, will keep his own existence constantly
supplied with the requisite heat to enable him to put forth kindly
fruit._




MIRABAUD'S

SYSTEM OF NATURE


Translated from the Original,

BY SAMUEL WILKINSON.




PART I.

LAWS OF NATURE--OF MAN--THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL--DOCTRINE OF
IMMORTALITY--ON HAPPINESS.




CHAP. I.

_Nature and her Laws_.


Man has always deceived himself when he abandoned experience to follow
imaginary systems.--He is the work of nature.--He exists in Nature.--He
is submitted to the laws of Nature.--He cannot deliver himself from
them:--cannot step beyond them even in thought. It is in vain his mind
would spring forward beyond the visible world: direful and imperious
necessity ever compels his return--being formed by Nature, he is
circumscribed by her laws; there exists nothing beyond the great whole
of which he forms a part, of which he experiences the influence. The
beings his fancy pictures as above nature, or distinguished from her,
are always chimeras formed after that which he has already seen, but of
which it is utterly impossible he should ever form any finished idea,
either as to the place they occupy, or their manner of acting--for him
there is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes all
beings.

Therefore, instead of seeking out of the world he inhabits for beings
who can procure him a happiness denied to him by Nature, let him study
this Nature, learn her laws, contemplate her energies, observe the
immutable rules by which she acts.--Let him apply these discoveries to
his own felicity, and submit in silence to her precepts, which nothing
can alter.--Let him cheerfully consent to be ignorant of causes hid from
him under the most impenetrable veil.--Let him yield to the decrees of a
universal power, which can never be brought within his comprehension,
nor ever emancipate him from those laws imposed on him by his essence.

The distinction which has been so often made between the _physical_ and
the _moral_ being, is evidently an abuse of terms. Man is a being purely
physical: the moral man is nothing more than this physical being
considered under a certain point of view; that is to say, with relation
to some of his modes of action, arising out of his individual
organization. But is not this organization itself the work of Nature?
The motion or impulse to action, of which he is susceptible, is that not
physical? His visible actions, as well as the invisible motion
interiorly excited by his will or his thoughts, are equally the natural
effects, the necessary consequences, of his peculiar construction, and
the impulse he receives from those beings by whom he is always
surrounded. All that the human mind has successively invented, with a
view to change or perfect his being, to render himself happy, was never
more than the necessary consequence of man's peculiar essence, and that
of the beings who act upon him. The object of all his institutions, all
his reflections, all his knowledge, is only to procure that happiness
toward which he is continually impelled by the peculiarity of his
nature. All that he does, all that he thinks, all that he is, all that
he will be, is nothing more than what Universal Nature has made him. His
ideas, his actions, his will, are the necessary effects of those
properties infused into him by Nature, and of those circumstances in
which she has placed him. In short, art is nothing but Nature acting
with the tools she has furnished.

Nature sends man naked and destitute into this world which is to be his
abode: he quickly learns to cover his nakedness--to shelter himself from
the inclemencies of the weather, first with artlessly constructed huts,
and the skins of the beasts of the forest; by degrees he mends their
appearance, renders them more convenient: he establishes manufactories
to supply his immediate wants; he digs clay, gold, and other fossils
from the bowels of the earth; converts them into bricks for his house,
into vessels for his use, gradually improves their shape, and augments
their beauty. To a being exalted above our terrestrial globe, man would
not appear less subjected to the laws of Nature when naked in the forest
painfully seeking his sustenance, than when living in civilized society
surrounded with ease, or enriched with greater experience, plunged in
luxury, where he every day invents a thousand new wants and discovers a
thousand new modes of supplying them. All the steps taken by man to
regulate his existence, ought only to be considered as a long succession
of causes and effects, which are nothing more than the development of
the first impulse given him by nature.

The same animal, by virtue of his organization, passes successively from
the most simple to the most complicated wants; it is nevertheless the
consequence of his nature. The butterfly whose beauty we admire, whose
colours are so rich, whose appearance is so brilliant, commences as an
inanimate unattractive egg; from this, heat produces a worm, this
becomes a chrysalis, then changes into that beautiful insect adorned
with the most vivid tints: arrived at this stage he reproduces, he
generates; at last despoiled of his ornaments, he is obliged to
disappear, having fulfilled the task imposed on him by Nature, having
performed the circle of transformation marked out for beings of his
order.

The same course, the same change takes place in the vegetable world. It
is by a series of combinations originally interwoven with the energies
of the aloe, that this plant is insensibly regulated, gradually
expanded, and at the end of a number of years produces those flowers
which announce its dissolution.

It is equally so with man, who in all his motion, all the changes he
undergoes, never acts but according to the laws peculiar to his
organization, and to the matter of which he is composed.

The _physical man_, is he who acts by the causes our faculties make us
understand.

The _moral man_, is he who acts by physical causes, with which our
prejudices preclude us from becoming perfectly acquainted.

The _wild man_ is a child destitute of experience, incapable of
proceeding in his happiness, because he has not learnt how to oppose
resistance to the impulses he receives from those beings by whom he is
surrounded.

The _civilized man_, is he whom experience and sociality have enabled to
draw from nature the means of his own happiness, because he has learned
to oppose resistance to those impulses he receives from exterior beings,
when experience has taught him they would be destructive to his welfare.

The _enlightened man_ is man in his maturity, in his perfection; who is
capable of advancing his own felicity, because he has learned to
examine, to think for himself, and not to take that for truth upon the
authority of others, which experience has taught him a critical
disquisition will frequently prove erroneous.

The _happy man_ is he who knows how to enjoy the benefits bestowed upon
him by nature: in other words, he who thinks for himself; who is
thankful for the good he possesses; who does not envy the welfare of
others, nor sigh after imaginary benefits always beyond his grasp.

The _unhappy man_ is he who is incapacitated to enjoy the benefits of
nature; that is, he who suffers others to think for him; who neglects
the absolute good he possesses, in a fruitless search after ideal
benefits; who vainly sighs after that which ever eludes his pursuit.

It necessarily results, that man in his enquiry ought always to
contemplate experience, and natural philosophy: These are what he should
consult in his religion,--in his morals,--in his legislation,--in his
political government,--in the arts,--in the sciences,--in his
pleasures,--above all, in his misfortunes. Experience teaches that
Nature acts by simple, regular, and invariable laws. It is by his
senses, man is bound to this universal Nature; it is by his perception
he must penetrate her secrets; it is from his senses he must draw
experience of her laws. Therefore, whenever he neglects to acquire
experience or quits its path, he stumbles into an abyss; his imagination
leads him astray.

All the errors of man are physical: he never deceives himself but when
he neglects to return back to nature, to consult her laws, to call
practical knowledge to his aid. It is for want of practical knowledge he
forms such imperfect ideas of matter, of its properties, of its
combinations, of its power, of its mode of action, and of the energies
which spring from its essence. Wanting this experience, the whole
universe, to him, is but one vast scene of error. The most ordinary
results appear to him the most astonishing phenomena; he wonders at
every thing, understands nothing, and yields the guidance of his actions
to those interested in betraying his interests. He is ignorant of
Nature, and he has mistaken her laws; he has not contemplated the
necessary routine which she has marked out for every thing she holds.
Mistaken the laws of Nature, did I say? He has mistaken himself: the
consequence is, that all his systems, all his conjectures, all his
reasonings, from which he has banished experience, are nothing more than
a tissue of errors, a long chain of inconsistencies.

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