founded on our approbation of those actions which are advantageous to
the race. When good actions benefit others and not ourselves our
approbation of them is similar to the admiration we feel for a fine
picture belonging to some one else. The good man is he whose true ideas
have shown him that his happiness lies in a line of conduct which others
are forced by their own interests to like and approve. By virtue we
acquire the good will of our neighbors, and no man can be happy without
it. Our self-love becomes a hundred times more delightful when to it is
joined the love of others for us. Let us remember that the most
impracticable of all designs is that of being happy alone.

To this point in his argument Holbach had only repeated with strength,
clearness and consistency what the school of the Philosophers from
Voltaire to Helvetius had either affirmed or hinted. In his second
volume, however, he boldly cut loose from his predecessors and avowed
his disbelief in any God. Voltaire and Rousseau were theists, with
different sorts of faith, and the Philosophers, although treating all
churches, and especially all priests, with contempt, had retained, at
least in speech, some remnant of theism. But Holbach declared that God
was an illusion, devised by the fears and the ignorance of mankind. "The
idea of Divinity," he says, "always awakens afflicting ideas in our
minds. "By the word "God" men mean the most hidden or remote cause; they
use the word only when the chain of material and known causes ceases to
be visible to them. It is a vague name which they apply to a cause short
of which their indolence, or the limits of their knowledge, forces them
to stop. Men found nature deaf to their cries; they therefore imagined
an intelligent master over it, hoping that he would listen to them.

This theme is elaborated by Holbach throughout his second volume. Here
as elsewhere he writes with seriousness and conviction, although some of