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
repelled by those beings which he believes prejudicial, either to his
habitual, or to his transitory mode of existence; by that which he
considers disadvantageous. It is only by the aid of experience, that man
acquires the faculty of understanding what he ought to love; of knowing
what he ought to fear. Are his organs sound? his experience will be
true: are they unsound? it will be false: in the first instance he will
have reason, prudence, foresight; he will frequently foresee very remote
effects; he will know, that what he sometimes contemplates as a good,
may possibly become an evil, by its necessary or probable consequences:
that what must be to him a transient evil, may by its result procure him
a solid and durable good. It is thus experience enables him to foresee
that the amputation of a limb will cause him painful sensation, he
consequently is obliged to fear this operation, and he endeavours
to avoid the pain; but if experience has also shewn him, that the
transitory pain this amputation will cause him may be the means of
saving his life; the preservation, of his existence being of necessity
dear to him, he is obliged to submit himself to the momentary pain with
a view to procuring a permanent good, by which it will be overbalanced.
The will, as we have elsewhere said, is a modification of the brain, by
which it is disposed to action or prepared to give play to the organs.
This will is necessarily determined by the qualities, good or bad,
agreeable or painful, of the object or the motive that acts upon his
senses; or of which the idea remains with him, and is resuscitated
by his memory. In consequence, he acts necessarily; his action is the
result of the impulse he receives either from the motive, from the
object, or from the idea, which has modified his brain, or disposed
his will. When he does not act according to this impulse, it is because
there comes some new cause, some new motive, some new idea, which
modifies his brain in a different manner, gives him a new impulse,
determines his will in another way; by which the action of the former
impulse is suspended: thus, the sight of an agreeable object, or its
idea, determines his will to set him in action to procure it; but if a
new object or a new idea more powerfully attracts him, it gives a
new direction to his will, annihilates the effect of the former, and
prevents the action by which it was to be procured. This is the mode in
which reflection, experience, reason, necessarily arrests or suspends
the action of man's will; without this, he would, of necessity, have
followed the anterior impulse which carried him towards a then desirable
object. In all this he always acts according to necessary laws, from
which he has no means of emancipating himself.
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