d only by experience and the testimony of their
senses, and to perceive nothing in nature except matter, essentially
active and mobile and capable of producing all the beings that we see;
to forego all search for a chimerical cause, and not to mistake for
better knowledge of the moving force of the universe, merely a separate
attribution of it to a Being placed outside of the great whole; to
confess in good faith that their mind can neither conceive nor reconcile
the negative attributes and theological abstractions with the human and
moral qualities that are ascribed to the Divinity.

The chapter (ix.) on the superiority of Naturalism over Theism as a
basis for the most wholesome kind of Morality, is still worth reading by
men in search of weapons against the presumptuous commonplaces of the
pulpit. In this sphere Holbach is as earnest and severe as the most
rigorous moralist that ever wrote. People who talk of the moral levity
of the destructive literature of the eighteenth century would be
astonished, if they could bring themselves to read the books about which
they talk, by the elevation of the _System of Nature_. The writer points
out the necessarily evil influence upon morals of a Book popularly taken
to be inspired, in which the Divinity is represented as now prescribing
virtue, but now again prescribing crime and absurdity; who is sometimes
the friend, and sometimes the enemy, of the human race; who is sometimes
pictured as reasonable, just, and beneficent, and at other times as
insensate: unjust, capricious, and despotic. Such divinities, and the
priests of such divinities, are incapable of being the models, types,
and arbiters of virtue and righteousness. No; we must seek a base for
morality in the necessity of things. Whatever the Cause that placed man
in the abode in which he dwells, and endowed him with his
faculties--whether we regard the human species as the work of Nature, or
of some intelligent Being distinct from Nature--the existence of man,
such as we see him to be, is a fact. We see in him a being who feels,
thinks, has intelligence, has self-love, who strives to make life
agreeable to himself, and who lives in society with beings like
himself; beings whom by his conduct he may make his friends or his
enemies. It is on these universal sentiments that you ought to base
morality, which is nothing more nor less than the science of the duties
of man living in society. The moment you attempt to find a base