compact is susceptible: society is unjust, it is bad, it is unworthy our
esteem, when it is partial to a few, when it is cruel to the greater
number: it is then that it multiplies its enemies, obliges them to
revenge themselves by criminal actions which it is under the necessity
to punish. It is not upon the caprices of political society that depend
the true notions of justice and injustice--the right ideas of moral good
and evil--a just appreciation of merit and demerit; it is upon
_utility_, upon the necessity of things, which always forces man to feel
that there exists a mode of acting on which he implicitly relies, which
he is obliged to venerate, which he cannot help approving either in his
fellows, in himself, or in society: whilst there is another mode to
which he cannot lend his confidence, which his nature makes him to hate,
which his feelings compel him to condemn. It is upon his own peculiar
essence that man founds his ideas of pleasure and of pain--of right and
of wrong--of vice and of virtue: the only difference between these is,
that pleasure and pain make them instantaneously felt in his brain; he
becomes conscious of their existence upon the spot; in the place of
which, the advantages that accrue to him from justice, the benefit that
he derives from virtue, frequently do not display themselves but after a
long train of reflections--after multiplied experience and complicated
attention; which many, either from a defect in their conformation, or
from the peculiarity of the circumstances under which they are placed,
are prevented from making, or at least from making correctly.

By a necessary consequence of this truism, the system of fatalism,
although it has frequently been so accused, does not tend to encourage
man in crime, to make remorse vanish from his mind. His propensities are
to be ascribed to his nature; the use he makes of his passions depends
upon his habits, upon his opinions, upon the ideas he has received in
his education; upon the examples held forth by the society in which he