f the radical ideas which the century had produced,
were no doubt the chief causes of its unsympathetic reception by the
public. Similarly unsuccessful was the popular account of materialism with
which Holbach followed it, in 1772, and Helvetius's excerpts from the
_System of Nature_, 1774.

Holbach applies himself to the despiritualization of nature and the
destruction of religious prejudices with sincere faith in the sacred
mission of unbelief--the happiness of humanity depends on atheism. "O
Nature, sovereign of all beings, and ye her daughters, Virtue, Reason, and
Truth, be forever our only divinities." What has made virtue so difficult
and so rare? Religion, which divides men instead of uniting them. What has
so long delayed the illumination of the reason, and the discovery of truth?
Religion with its mischievous errors, God, spirit, freedom, immortality.
Immortality exists only in the memory of later generations; man is the
creature of a day; nothing is permanent but the great whole of nature and
the eternal law of universal change. Can a clock broken into a thousand
pieces continue to mark the hours? The senseless doctrine of freedom was
invented only to solve the senseless problem of the justification of God in
view of the existence of evil. Man is at every moment of his life a passive
instrument in the hands of necessity; the universe is an immeasurable
and uninterrupted chain of actions and reactions, an eternal round of
interchanging motions, ruled by laws, a change in which would at once alter
the nature of all things. The most fatal error is the idea of human and
divine spirits, which has been advanced by philosophers and adopted with
applause by fools. The opinion that man is divided into two substances is
based on the fact that, of the changes in our body, we directly perceive
only the external molar movements, while, on the other hand, the inner
motions of the invisible molecules are known only by their effects. These
latter have been ascribed to the mind, which, moreover, we have adorned
with properties whose emptiness is manifested by the fact that they are all
mere negations of that which we know. Experience reveals to us only the
extended, the corporeal, the divisible--but the mind is to be the opposite
of all three, yet at the same time to possess the power (how, no man can
tell) of acting on that which is material and of being acted upon by it.
In thus dividing himself into body and soul, man has in