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TITLE: THE SYSTEM OF NATURE, VOL. 1
AUTHOR: BARON D'HOLBACH
EBOOK: E06231 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PRODUCTION NOTES: First published in French in 1770 under the
pseudonym of Mirabaud.  This e-book based on a facsimile reprint
of an English translation originally published 1820-21.
This e-text covers the first of the original two volumes.

THE SYSTEM OF NATURE
Volume I

Paul Henri Thiery,
Baron d'Holbach

Introduction by
Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

INTRODUCTION

Paul Henri Thiery, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was the center of the
radical wing of the _philosophes_. He was friend, host, and patron to a
wide circle that included Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Hume.
Holbach wrote, translated, edited, and issued a stream of books and
pamphlets, often under other names, that has made him the despair of
bibliographers but has connected his name, by innuendo, gossip, and
association, with most of what was written in defense of atheistic
materialism in late eighteenth-century France.

Holbach is best known for _The System of Nature_ (1770) and deservedly,
since it is a clear and reasonably systematic exposition of his main
ideas. His initial position determines all the rest of his argument.
"There is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes
all beings." Conceiving of nature as strictly limited to matter and
motion, both of which have always existed, he flatly denies that there
is any such thing as spirit or a supernatural. Mythology began, Holbach
claims, when men were still in a state of nature and at the point when
wise, strong, and for the most part benign men were arising as leaders
and lawgivers. These leaders "formed discourses by which they spoke to
the imaginations of their willing auditors," using the medium of poetry,
because it "seem[ed] best adapted to strike the mind." Through poetry,
then, and by means of "its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme,
its harmony... the entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was
personified, by its beautiful allegories." Thus mythology is given an
essentially political origin. These early poets are literally
legislators of mankind. "The first institutors of nations, and their
immediate successors in authority, only spoke to the people by fables,
allegories, enigmas, of which they reserved to themselves the right of
giving an explanation." Holbach is rather condescending about the
process, but since mythology is a representation of nature itself, he is
far more tolerant of mythology than he is of the next step. "Natural
philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians
and theologians," and at this point a fatal error was introduced: the
theologians made a distinction between the power of nature and nature
itself, separated the two, made the power of nature prior to nature, and
called it God. Thus man was left with an abstract and chimerical being
on one side and a despoiled inert nature, destitute of power, on the
other. In Holbach's critique the point at which theology split off from
mythology marks the moment of nature's alienation from itself and paves
the way for man's alienation from nature.

Holbach is thus significant for Romantic interest in myth in two ways.
First, he provides a clear statement of what can be loosely called the
antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of
all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the
Romantic era. Holbach was and is a reminder that the Romantic
affirmation of myth was never easy, uncritical, or unopposed. Any new
endorsement of myth had to be made in the teeth of Holbach and the other
skeptics. The very vigor of the Holbachian critique of myth impelled the
Romantics to think more deeply and defend more carefully any new claim
for myth. Secondly, although Holbach's argument generally drove against
myth and religion both, he did make an important, indeed a saving
distinction between mythology and theology. Mythology is the more or
less harmless personification of the power in and of nature; theology
concerns itself with what for Holbach was the nonexistent power beyond
or behind nature. By exploiting this distinction it would become
possible for a Shelley, for example, to take a strong antitheological--
even an anti-Christian--position without having to abandon myth.

Holbach was one of William Godwin's major sources for his ideas about
political justice, and Shelley, who discussed Holbach with Godwin,
quotes extensively from _The System of Nature_ in _Queen Mab_.
Furthermore, Volney's _Ruins_, another important book for Shelley, is
directly descended from _The System of Nature_. On the other side,
Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe
and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his
work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and
Barlow.

Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former
perpetual secretary to the Academie francaise who had died ten years
before), _La Systeme de la nature_ was translated and reprinted
frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint
was the most often reprinted or pirated version in English. A useful
starting point for Holbach's work is Jerome Vercruysse, _Bibliographie
descriptive des ecrits du baron d'Holbach_ (Paris, 1971). The difficult
subject of the essentially clandestine evolution of biblical criticism
as an anti-Christian and antimyth critique in the early part of the
eighteenth century, before the well-documented era of the biblical
critic Eichhorn in Germany, is illuminated in Ira Wade, _The Clandestine
Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700-
1750_ (Princeton Univ. Press, 1938).

Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
University of Denver

*     *     *     *     *

[Illustration:
Parke sculp't
M. DE MIRABAUD

THE
SYSTEM OF NATURE;
OR,
_THE LAWS_
OF THE
MORAL AND PHYSICAL WORLD.

TRANSLATED
FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH OF
M. DE MIRABAUD

VOL. I.

CONTENTS

Preface

     PART I--Laws of Nature.--Of man.--The faculties of the soul.
     --Doctrine of immortality.--On happiness.

CHAP. I.  Nature and her laws.

CHAP. II.  Of motion and its origin.

CHAP. III.  Of matter--of its various combinations--of its
diversified motion--or of the course of Nature.

CHAP. IV.  Laws of motion common to every being of Nature--
attraction and repulsion--inert force-necessity.

CHAP. V.  Order and confusion--intelligence--chance.

CHAP. VI.  Moral and physical distinctions of man--his origin.

CHAP. VII.  The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VII.  The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VIII.  The intellectual faculties derived from the faculty of
feeling.

CHAP. IX.  The diversity of the intellectual faculties; they depend
on physical causes, as do their moral qualities.--The natural
principles of society--morals--politics.

CHAP. X.  The soul does not derive its ideas from itself--it has
no innate ideas.

CHAP. XI.  Of the system of man's free-agency.

CHAP. XII.  An examination of the opinion which pretends that the
system of fatalism is dangerous.

CHAP. XIII.  Of the immortality of the soul--of the doctrine of a
future state--of the fear of death.

CHAP. XIV.  Education, morals, and the laws suffice to restrain
man--of the desire of immortality--of suicide.

CHAP. XV.  Of man's true interest, or of the ideas he forms to
himself of happiness.--Man cannot be happy without virtue.

CHAP. XVI.  The errors of man.--Upon what constitutes happiness.--
The true source of his evils.--Remedies that may be applied.

CHAP. XVII.  Those ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature,
are the only remedies for the evil of man.--Recapitulation.--
Conclusions of the First Part.

PREFACE

_The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The
pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his
infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent
prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders
him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He
resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a
dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity
obscure, it is vacillating and false:--He takes the tone of his ideas on
the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an
interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these
barriers to the improvement of his condition; to disentangle him from
the clouds of error that envelope him; to guide him out of this Cretan
labyrinth, requires the clue of Ariadne, with all the love she could
bestow on Theseus. It exacts more than common exertion; it needs a most
determined, a most undaunted courage--it is never effected but by a
persevering resolution to act, to think for himself; to examine with
rigour and impartiality the opinions he has adopted. He will find that

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