lf keenly in all that concerns the lot
of his fellow-creatures. How does our knowledge that death is necessary
prevent us from deploring the loss of a beloved one? How does my
consciousness that it is the inevitable property of fire to burn,
prevent me from using all my efforts to avert a conflagration?

Finally, when people urge that the doctrine of necessity degrades man by
reducing him to a machine, and likening him to some growth of abject
vegetation, they are merely using a kind of language that was invented
in ignorance of what constitutes the true dignity of man. What is nature
itself but a vast machine, in which our human species is no more than
one weak spring? The good man is a machine whose springs are adapted so
to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results for his
fellows. How could such an instrument not be an object of respect and
affection and gratitude?

In closing this part of Holbach's book, while not dissenting from his
conclusions, we will only remark how little conscious he seems of the
degree to which he empties the notions of praise and blame of the very
essence of their old contents. It is not a modification, but the
substitution of a new meaning under the old names. Praise in its new
sense of admiration for useful and pleasure-giving conduct or motive, is
as powerful a force and as adequate an incentive to good conduct and
good motives, as praise in the old sense of admiration for a deliberate
and voluntary exercise of a free-acting will. But the two senses are
different. The old ethical association is transformed into something
which usage and the requirements of social self-preservation must make
equally potent, but which is not the same. If Holbach and others who
hold necessarian opinions were to perceive this more frankly, and to
work it out fully, they would prevent a confusion that is very
unfavourable to them in the minds of most of those whom they wish to
persuade. It is easy to see that the work next to be done in the region
of morals, is the readjustment of the ethical phraseology of the
volitional stage, to fit the ideas proper to the stage in which man has
become as definitely the object of science as any of the other phenomena
of the universe.

The chapter (xiii.) on the Immortality of the Soul examines this
memorable growth of human belief with great vigour, and a most
destructive penetration. As we have seen, the author repudiates the
theory of a double energy in