It set out to prove a new theory of human action, and a new system of morality. Virtue and vice? There are no such things. Self-interest, rightly understood, is the explanation of the one, and self-interest, misunderstood, of the other. Selfishness and the passions are the sole mainsprings of our deeds. So far from character being destiny, as Novalis is to declare, destiny is in all cases character. Everybody is the creature of his environment and his education. Free Will? What free will to be an honest man has the child of thieves, brought up to thieve in a slum? Change his condition, and you change him. Leave him, and he will steal as certainly as fire burns and the waves beat on the shore. As for the vaunted superiority of the human intelligence over the brutes, ‘an accident of physical organisation’ can account for that. We are _as_ the brutes, only a little better, and the difference is wholly of degree, not of kind. Put these theories, with their showy falsehood and their substratum of truth, on the library table of any clever man, and get him to do his best to prove them by sophistry and ingenuity, by trick, by subterfuge, by illustration--somehow, anyhow, so that he prove them to the hilt--and the result will be pretty well what Helvétius made it. There was scarcely a good story, or a bad one, he had heard in his early gay life in Paris that he did not bring in, by hook or by crook, to point and enliven his paradox. Madame de Graffigny told Bettinelli that nearly all the notes were the ‘sweepings’ of her _salon_. ‘On the Mind’ is entertaining or nothing--difficulties presented solely that they may be wittily demolished--easy, inaccurate, trifling; a style ‘insinuating and caressing ... made for light minds, young people and women,’ says Damiron; a book which fashion might skip at its toilette, and then, on the strength of remembering two or three of its dubious anecdotes, claim a complete knowledge of its _bizarre_ philosophy. For it was but a _bizarrerie_--a _jeu d’esprit_--and Helvétius knew it. He was merely concerned to see how far his impossible theories could be made plausible, and wrote them to catch the public ear, and turn their author into the lion and darling of the season. When the thing was ready he took it to Tercier, the censor, who passed it, suggesting only the omission of a few too complimentary references to free-thinking Hume. Helvétius cut them out. Malesherbes, during its printing, observed uneasily that the book contained ‘some very strong things’--insolent remarks, for instance, on that dear, crusted old despotism under which we all live, and certainly a suggestion that any means to overthrow tyranny are permissible. But, all the same, in May 1758 it received its privilege. Majesty was graciously pleased to accept a copy from the author, our _maître d’hôtel_. It was already in the hands of the philosophers. And everybody began to read.