The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 2Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Religion
The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 2
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Materialism; Philosophy and religion; Psychology
subject to his sovereign; a worse father to his children; a more unkind
husband; a more faithless friend?
Motion, then, is co-eternal with matter: from all eternity the particles
of the universe have acted and reacted upon each other, by virtue
of their respective energies; of their peculiar essences; of their
primitive elements; of their various combinations. These particles must
have combined in consequence of their affinity; they must have been
either attracted or repelled by their respective relations with each
other; in virtue of these various essences, they must have gravitated
one upon the other; united when they were analagous; separated when that
analogy was dissolved, by the approach of heterogeneous matter; they
must have received their forms, undergone a change of figure, by the
continual collision of bodies. In a material world the acting powers
must be material: in a whole every part of which is essentially in
motion, there is no occasion for a power distinguished from itself;
the whole must be in perpetual motion by its own peculiar energy. The
general motion, as we have elsewhere proved, has its birth from the
individual motion, which beings ever active must uninterruptedly
communicate to each other. Thus every cause produces its effect; this
effect in its turn becomes a cause, which in like manner produces an
effect; this constitutes the eternal chain of things, which although
perpetually changing in its detail, suffers no change in its whole.
Theology, after all, has seldom done more than personify this eternal
series of motion; the principle of mobility inherent to matter: it has
clothed this principle with human qualities, by which it has rendered it
unintelligible: in applying these properties, they have taken no means
of understanding how far they were suitable or not: in their eagerness
to make them assimilate, they have extended them beyond their own
conception; they have heaped them together without any judgment;
and they have been surprised when these qualities, contradictory in
themselves, did not enable them satisfactorily to account for all the
phenomena they beheld; from thence they have wrangled; accused each
other of imbecility; yet infuriated themselves against whoever had the
temerity to question that which they did not themselves understand; in
short, they have acted like a man who should insist that all other men
should have precisely the same vision that he himself had dreamed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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