place of the rich and clever worldling, so often found in literary
circles.

The treatise "De l'Esprit" has for its object the setting forth of the
doctrine of utility in its extreme form. As a preliminary argument all
the operations of the mind are reduced to sensation. "When by a
succession of my ideas, or by the vibration which certain sounds cause
in the organ of my ears, I recall the image of an oak, then my interior
organs must necessarily be nearly in the same situation as they were at
the sight of that oak. Now this situation of the organs must necessarily
produce a sensation; it is, therefore, evident that memory is sensation.

"Having stated this principle, I say further that it is in the capacity
which we have of perceiving the resemblances or the differences, the
agreement or the disagreement, which different objects have with each
other, that all the operations of the mind consist. Now this capacity is
nothing else than physical sensibility; therefore everything is reduced
to sensation."

Utility, according to Helvetius, is the foundation of all our moral
feelings. Each person praises as just in others only those actions which
are useful to himself; every nation or society praises what is useful to
it in its corporate capacity. "If a judge acquits a guilty man, if a
minister of state promotes an unworthy one, each is just, according to
the man protected. But if the judge punishes, or the minister refuses,
they will always be unjust in the eyes of the criminal and of the
unsuccessful."... "The Christians who justly spoke of the cruelties
practiced on them by the pagans as barbarity and crime, did they not
give the name of zeal to the cruelties which they, in their turn,
practiced on these same pagans?" As the physical world is subject to