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Updated: June 27, 2025
The denial of immortality and the divine origin of the world is, however, by no means to follow from materialism. Priestley not only combated the atheism of Holbach, but also entered the deistic ranks with works of his own on Natural Religion and the Corruptions of Christianity. James Mill has repeated this thought in later times.
Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the “soul” is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires.
Holbach for a whole quarter of a century had regular dinner-parties on Sundays, which are celebrated in the history of atheism. All those were invited, who were too bold and too out-spoken for Geoffrin; and even D'Alembert also at a later period withdrew from their society.
The chief merit of the Vindication is its clear perception that everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the attitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers. Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy.
The confidence of the supporters of the mechanical theories of earlier days, from Descartes onward, that animals and the bodies of men were machines, mechanical automata, down to the mechanical theories of Lamettrie and Holbach, of l’homme machine, and of the système de la nature, was at least as great as, probably greater than, that of the supporters of the modern theories.
Helvetius and Holbach had worked out the theories of the school to their last philosophical conclusion. A younger writer in the last years of the reign of Louis XV. was to furnish the complete application of them. The Chevalier de Chastellux is well known in America by the book of travels which he wrote when he accompanied the Marquis of Rochambeau in the Revolutionary War.
There are some good critical remarks in Helvétius about women's education; but the first man in that century who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what several dimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarly shocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his Système Social opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot of women is to submit to tyranny.
He carried to a great extreme an idea which in England had been held by Hooker, and more explicitly expounded by Locke. His doctrine furnished a theory for the political revolution in France. The "Encyclopaedists" went much beyond Voltaire and Rousseau. D'Alembert, Helvetius, Holbach, advocated atheism and materialism. All religious sentiment was condemned as morbid illusion.
Princes, as Holbach puts it, are gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutions and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of prejudice and despotism.
For her part, she resolved upon doing it forever, and seeing on one side her daughter and myself, who were in a situation to live, and that was all; on the other, Diderot, Grimm, D' Holbach and Madam d'Epinay, who promised great things, and gave some little ones, she could not conceive it was possible to be in the wrong with the wife of a farmer-general and baron.
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