It would not have been wonderful, if the theories had had a little more _vraisemblance_, that most people, particularly people who had devoted their lives and their fortunes to others, who had laboured in poverty that other men might be free and rich, should object to see their self-denial set down as self-interest, and to be informed that the highest aspiration of their soul was really nothing but a morbid condition of the body. But, considering their manifest absurdity, it is wonderful that these assertions were taken seriously. Madame du Deffand, indeed, might naturally say that in making self-interest the mainspring of conduct, Helvétius had revealed everybody’s secret. He had so certainly discovered hers. But Turgot, whose life was to do good, had better have laughed at an absurdity than have risen up to condemn it as ‘philosophy without logic, literature without taste, and morality without goodness.’ A Condorcet, whose long devotion to duty was rewarded only with ruin and death, need not have troubled to loathe it. Rousseau immediately sat down to refute it: some of the most inspired pages of his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ still glow with the hatred with which it inspired him. Grimm wisely only pooh-poohed it. Voltaire grumbled that his pupil had promised a book on the Mind, and presented a treatise on Matter; that he had ‘put friendship among the bad passions,’ and, much worse than all, has actually compared _me_--ME--to two such feeble, second-rate luminaries as Crébillon and Fontenelle! No wonder that he found the title, ‘De l’Esprit,’ equivocal, the matter unmethodical, all the new things false and all the old ones truisms. For a very short time, however, approved or disapproved, taken as folly or mistaken for reason, the book went its way gaily. It bade fair to become what Helvétius had meant it to be--the success of a season. But for the besotted stupidity of the Government, it never would have been anything else. One unlucky day the Dauphin, who was more virtuous than wise, came out of his room with a copy in his hand and fury in his face. ‘I am going to show the Queen the sort of thing her _maître d’hôtel_ prints.’ On August 10, 1758, the privilege for its publication was revoked. Tercier was deprived of his office. ‘On the Mind’ was furiously attacked in the religious papers. The _avocat général_, Fleury, pronounced it ‘an abridgment of the Encyclopædia.’ The Archbishop of Paris declared it struck at the roots of Christianity. At Court, Helvétius was all at once ‘regarded as a child of perdition, and the Queen pitied his mother as if she had produced Anti-Christ.’ Rome banned the accursed thing. On January 31, 1759, the Pope attacked it with his own hand in a letter. On February 6 the Parliament of Paris condemned it. On February 10 it was publicly burned by the hangman, with Voltaire’s ‘Natural Law.’ On April 9 the Sorbonne censured it, and declared it to contain ‘the essence of the poisons’ of all modern literature.