A society enjoys all the happiness of which it is capable when the greater number of its members is fed, clothed, and lodged; when most men can, without excessive labor, satisfy the cravings of nature. Men's imagination should be satisfied when they are sure that the fruits of their labor cannot be taken from them, and that they are working for themselves. Beyond this all is superfluity, and it is foolish that a whole nation should sweat to give luxuries to a few persons who can never be content because their imaginations have become boundless. Religion is a delusion. The soul, born with the body, is childish in children, adult in manhood, grows old with advancing years. It is vain to suppose that the soul survives the body. To die is to think, to feel, to enjoy, to suffer, no more. Let us reflect on death, not to encourage fear and melancholy, but to accustom ourselves to look at it with peaceful eyes, and to throw off the false terror with which the enemies of our peace try to inspire us. Utility is the touchstone of systems, opinions, and actions; it is the measure of our very love of truth. The most useful truths are the most admired; we call those truths great which most concern the human race; those futile which concern only a few men whose ideas we do not share. The doctrine of utility is combined with that of necessity. Most of the French Philosophers were necessarians, but Holbach expressed the doctrine in a more extreme form than the others. Will, according to him, is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it. Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except that the impulse on the latter comes from something outside of himself, and that of the former from something within his own mechanism. [Footnote: Chaudon, the Benedictine, probably the cleverest of the clerical writers of the time, thus attacks the doctrine of necessity, as set forth by Holbach. The author of the _System_ has certainly given out very fine maxims of morality, very pathetic exhortations to virtue; but with his principles this can be but a joke. It is an absurdity, like that of a man who, recognizing that his watch was only a machine, should not fail to exhort it every day to prevent its getting out of order. Grosse, Diet. d'antiphilosophisme, 923. Holbach would probably have replied that he was necessarily obliged to exhort, and that Chaudon was fatally forced to answer.]