constitutes well-being."

D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in
the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he
drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading. From
his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between
nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the
savage state. Here he was at one with Aristotle.

All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect
man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary
consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon
him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of
what universal nature has made us. Art is only nature acting by the aid
of the instruments which she has fashioned. [Footnote: The passages of
d'Holbach specially referred to are: Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst.
de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst. soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i.
1, p. 3.]

Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or
condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature
against itself.

If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more
indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have
acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which modern reason may
give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have
recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no
less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most
thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity
anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which
could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded
as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and
customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past,
weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to
do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment
against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history could
be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the social memory
and the common heritage of past experiences which mould a human
society and make it something very different from a mere collection of
individuals.

Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did
not beguile d'Holbach or an