Utility is the touchstone of systems, opinions, and actions; it is the
measure of our very love of truth. The most useful truths are the most
admired; we call those truths great which most concern the human race;
those futile which concern only a few men whose ideas we do not share.

The doctrine of utility is combined with that of necessity. Most of the
French Philosophers were necessarians, but Holbach expressed the
doctrine in a more extreme form than the others. Will, according to him,
is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to
set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by
the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it.
Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different
directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of
one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who
throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except
that the impulse on the latter comes from something outside of himself,
and that of the former from something within his own mechanism.
[Footnote: Chaudon, the Benedictine, probably the cleverest of the
clerical writers of the time, thus attacks the doctrine of necessity, as
set forth by Holbach. The author of the _System_ has certainly
given out very fine maxims of morality, very pathetic exhortations to
virtue; but with his principles this can be but a joke. It is an
absurdity, like that of a man who, recognizing that his watch was only a
machine, should not fail to exhort it every day to prevent its getting
out of order. Grosse, Diet. d'antiphilosophisme, 923. Holbach would
probably have replied that he was necessarily obliged to exhort, and
that Chaudon was fatally forced to answer.]

Nature has made men neither good nor bad; it has made them machines. Man
is virtuous only in obedience to the call of interest. Morals are