THE SYSTEM OF NATURE Volume 1

VOL. I.




CONTENTS

Preface


PART I--Laws of Nature.--Of man.--The faculties of the soul.
--Doctrine of immortality.--On happiness.


CHAP. I. Nature and her laws.

CHAP. II. Of motion and its origin.

CHAP. III. Of matter--of its various combinations--of its
diversified motion--or of the course of Nature.

CHAP. IV. Laws of motion common to every being of Nature--
attraction and repulsion--inert force-necessity.

CHAP. V. Order and confusion--intelligence--chance.

CHAP. VI. Moral and physical distinctions of man--his origin.

CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system.

CHAP. VIII. The intellectual faculties derived from the faculty of
feeling.

CHAP. IX. The diversity of the intellectual faculties; they depend
on physical causes, as do their moral qualities.--The natural
principles of society--morals--politics.

CHAP. X. The soul does not derive its ideas from itself--it has
no innate ideas.

CHAP. XI. Of the system of man's free-agency.

CHAP. XII. An examination of the opinion which pretends that the
system of fatalism is dangerous.

CHAP. XIII. Of the immortality of the soul--of the doctrine of a
future state--of the fear of death.

CHAP. XIV. Education, morals, and the laws suffice to restrain
man--of the desire of immortality--of suicide.

CHAP. XV. Of man's true interest, or of the ideas he forms to
himself of happiness.--Man cannot be happy without virtue.

CHAP. XVI. The errors of man.--Upon what constitutes happiness.--
The true source of his evils.--Remedies that may be applied.

CHAP. XVII. Those ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature,
are the only remedies for the evil of man.--Recapitulation.--
Conclusions of the First Part.




PREFACE

_The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The
pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his
infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent
prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders
him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He
resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a
dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity
obscure, it is vacillating and false:--He takes the tone of his ideas on
the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an
interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these
barriers to the improvement of his condition; to disentangle him from
the clouds of error that envelope him; to guide him out of this Cretan
labyrinth, requires the clue of Ariadne, with all the love she could
bestow on Theseus. It exacts more than common exertion; it needs a most
determined, a most undaunted courage--it is never effected but by a
persevering resolution to act, to think for himself; to examine with
rigour and impartiality the opinions he has adopted. He will find that
the most noxious weeds have sprung up beside beautiful flowers; entwined
themselves around their stems, overshadowed them with an exuberance of
foliage, choaked the ground, enfeebled their growth, diminished their
petals; dimmed the brilliancy of their colours; that deceived by their
apparent freshness of their verdure, by the rapidity of their
exfoliation, he has given them cultivation, watered them, nurtured them,
when he ought to have plucked out their very roots.

Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated
checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the
impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world;
and hunts out misery in imaginary regions. He would be a metaphysician
before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation
of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on
conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis. He dares not cultivate his reason,
because from his earliest days he has been taught to consider it
criminal.