writes, because he believes truth must, sooner or later, prevail over
falsehood: _tyrants_ and _fanatical priests_ necessarily hate truth,
despise reason, because they believe them prejudicial to their
interests: the _sovereign_, who strives to terrify crime by the severity
of his laws, but who nevertheless, from motives of state policy
sometimes renders it useful and even necessary to his purposes, presumes
the motives he employs will be sufficient to keep his subjects within
bounds. All reckon equally upon the power or upon the necessity of the
motives they make use of; each individual flatters himself, either with
or without reason, that these motives will have an influence on the
conduct of mankind. The education of man is commonly so defective, so
inefficacious, so little calculated to promote the end he has in view,
because it is regulated by prejudice: even when this education is good,
it is but too often speedily counteracted, by almost every thing that
takes place in society. Legislation and politics are very frequently
iniquitous, and serve no better purpose than to kindle passions in the
bosom of man, which once set afloat, they are no longer competent to
restrain. The great art of the moralist should be, to point out to man,
to convince those who are entrusted with the sacred office of regulating
his will, that their interests are identified; that their reciprocal
happiness depends upon the harmony of their passions; that the safety,
the power, the duration of empires, necessarily depend on the good sense
diffused among the individual members; on the truth of the notions
inculcated in the mind of the citizens, on the moral goodness that is
sown in their hearts, on the virtues that are cultivated in their
breasts; religion should not be admissible, unless it truly fortified,
unless it really strengthened these motives. But in the miserable state
into which error has plunged a considerable portion of the human
species, man, for the most part, is seduced to be wicked: he injures his
fellow-creature as a matter of conscience, because the strongest motives