HOLBACH.--A disciple of the Encyclopaedist--Holbach, a young German settled in Paris--was bolder than his master, and published, under the name of a savant who had recently died, a book which became widely notorious, and has been called the Bible of materialism--the _Systeme de la Nature_ (1770). Like Voltaire's _Elemens_, and La Mettrie's _L'Homme Machine_, it was published in Holland. "The book is materialism reduced to a system. It contains no really new thoughts. Its significance lies in the energy and indignation with which every spiritualistic and dualistic view was run to earth on account of its injuriousness both in practice and in theory,"[20] is the estimate of a distinguished and impartial writer. Rumour gave the credit of its authorship to Diderot, who was so disturbed by the compliment as hastily to leave Paris for the frontier. His admiration of it is, however, recorded. After proclaiming his disgust at the contemporary fashion of "mixing up incredulity and superstition," he observes that no such fault is to be found in the _System of Nature_. "The author is not an atheist in one page, and a deist in another. His philosophy is all of a piece." Certainly to those with an appetite for negative dogmatism the work left nothing to be desired. The following passage indicates the attitude and method of the author, who, in the matter of style, did not fall short of the French tradition: "If we go back to the beginning, we shall always find that ignorance and fear have created gods; fancy, enthusiasm or deceit has adorned or disfigured them; weakness worships them; credulity preserves them in life; custom regards them, and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own ends." The philosophy of religion which inspired these sentences may appear to us sufficiently crude. And indeed an impartial reader will have to confess that much of this eighteenth century polemic against religion, however well-intentioned, is singularly wide of the mark. It is all characterised by an imperfect knowledge of the psychological foundations of religion, and quite devoid of what is now termed the "historic sense." The faults of Voltaire and Holbach, however, were those of their age, which was often short-sighted in its recognition of facts, and superficial in its reasoning from them. Even Dr. Johnson, who found this section of contemporary French literature so distasteful, never laid his finger upon its real weakness; the fundamental fallacies upon which it rested escaped him. He, like Voltaire and the rest, was a child of the age.