The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Religion
The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Materialism; Philosophy and religion; Psychology
such action, by any exterior object; which by moving its organs should
furnish it with an image of the subject of its thoughts. In consequence
of these gratuitous suppositions, of these extraordinary pretensions,
which it is only requisite to expose, in order to confute some very able
speculators, who were prepossessed by their superstitious prejudices;
have ventured the length to assert, that without model, without
prototype to act on the senses, the soul is competent to delineate to
itself, the whole universe with all the beings it contains. DESCARTES
and his disciples have assured us, that the body went absolutely for
nothing, in the sensations, in the perceptions, in the ideas of the
soul; that it can feel, that it can perceive, that it can understand,
that it can taste, that it can touch, even when there should exist
nothing that is corporeal or material exterior to ourselves. But what
shall be said of a BERKELEY, who has endeavoured, who has laboured to
prove to man, that every thing in this world is nothing more than a
chimerical illusion; that the universe exists nowhere but in himself;
that it has no identity but in his imagination; who has rendered the
existence of all things problematical by the aid of sophisms, insolvable
even to those who maintain the doctrine of the spirituality of the soul.
Extravagant as this doctrine of the BISHOP OF CLOYNE may appear, it
cannot well be more so than that of MALEBRANCHE, the champion of innate
ideas; who makes the divinity the common bond between the soul and the
body: or than that of those metaphysicians, who maintain that the soul
is a substance heterogeneous to the body; who by ascribing to this soul
the thoughts of man, have in fact rendered the body superfluous. They
have not perceived they were liable to one solid objection, which is,
that if the ideas of man are innate, if he derives them from a superior
being, independent of exterior causes, if he sees every thing in God;
how comes it that so many false ideas are afloat, that so many errors
prevail, with which the human mind is saturated? From whence comes these
opinions, which according to the theologians are so displeasing to God?
Might it not be a question to the Malebranchists, was it in the Divinity
that SPINOZA beheld his system?
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