of self-interest, when you mean beneficence, or than to
insist that because beneficence has become bound up with a man's
self-love, therefore beneficence _is_ nothing but self-love in disguise?
As if the fruit or the flower not only depends on a root as one of the
conditions among others of its development, but is itself actually the
root! Apart from the error in logic, what an error in rhetoric, to
single out the formula best calculated to fill a doctrine with odious
associations, and then to make that formula the most prominent feature
in the exposition. Without any gain in clearness or definiteness or
firmness, the reader is deliberately misled towards a form that is
exactly the opposite of that which Helvetius desired him to accept.

In other ways Helvetius takes trouble to wound the generous sensibility
and affront the sense of his public. Nothing can be at once more
scandalously cynical and more crude than a passage intended to show
that, if we examine the conduct of women of disorderly life from the
political point of view, they are in some respects extremely useful to
the public. That desire to please, which makes such a woman go to the
draper, the milliner, and the dressmaker, draws an infinite number of
workmen from indigence. The virtuous women, by giving alms to mendicants
and criminals, are far less wisely advised by their religious directors
than the other women by their desire to please; the latter nourish
useful citizens, while the former, who at the best are useless, are
often even downright enemies to the nation.[123] All this is only a
wordy transcript of Mandeville's coarse sentences about "the sensual
courtier that sets no limits to his luxury, and the fickle strumpet that
invents new fashions every week." We cannot wonder that all people who
were capable either of generous feeling or comprehensive thinking turned
aside even from truth, when it was mixed in this amalgam of destructive
sophistry and cynical illustration.

[123] _Disc._ ii. 15.

We can believe how the magnanimous youth of Madame Roland and others
was discouraged by pages sown with mean anecdote. Helvetius tells us,
with genuine zest, of Parmenio saying to Philotas at the court of
Alexander the Great--"My son, make thyself small before Alexander;
contrive for him now and again the pleasure of setting thee right; and
remember that it is only to thy seeming inferiority that thou wilt owe
his friendship." The King of Portugal charg