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
This example will serve to explain the whole phaenomena of the human
will. This will, or rather the brain, finds itself in the same situation
as a bowl, which although it has received an impulse that drives it
forward in a straight line, is deranged in its course, whenever a force,
superior to the first, obliges it to change its direction. The man who
drinks the poisoned water, appears a madman; but the actions of fools
are as necessary as those of the most prudent individuals. The motives
that determine the voluptuary, that actuate the debauchee to risk their
health, are as powerful, their actions are as necessary, as those
which decide the wise man to manage his. But, it will be insisted, the
debauchee may be prevailed on to change his conduct; this does not imply
that he is a free agent; but, that motives may be found sufficiently
powerful to annihilate the effect of those that previously acted upon
him; then these new motives determine his will to the new mode of
conduct he may adopt, as necessarily as the former did to the old mode.
Man is said to _deliberate_ when the action of the will is suspended;
this happens when two opposite motives act alternately upon him.
To deliberate, is to hate and to love in succession; it is to be
alternately attracted and repelled; it is to be moved sometimes by one
motive, sometimes by another. Man only deliberates when he does not
distinctly understand the quality of the objects from which he receives
impulse, or when experience has not sufficiently apprised him of the
effects, more or less remote, which his actions will produce. He
would take the air, but the weather is uncertain; he deliberates in
consequence; he weighs the various motives that urge his will to go out
or to stay at home; he is at length determined by that motive which is
most probable; this removes his indecision, which necessarily settles
his will either to remain within or to go abroad: this motive is always
either the immediate or ultimate advantage he finds or thinks he finds
in the action to which he is persuaded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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