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252 THE FRENCH ILLUMINATIOPf. rather in an anthropological form than as a world-system, and with cynical satisfaction in the violation of traditional beliefs — in his Natural History of the Soul, 1745, in a dis- guised form, and, undisguised, in his Man a Machine, 1748 — and at the same time {Anti-Seneca, or Discourse on Happiness, 1748) had sketched out for Helvetius the outlines of the sensationalistic morality of interest. While ill with a violent fever he observed the influence of the heightened circulation of the blood on his mental tone, and in- ferred that thought is the result of the bodily organization. The soul can only be known from the body. The senses, the best philosophers, teach us that matter is never with- out form and motion ; and whether all matter is sentient or not, certainly all that is sentient is material, and every part of the organism contains a vital principle (the heart of a frog beats for an hour after its removal from the body; the parts of cut-up polyps grow into perfect animals). All ideas come from without, from the senses ; without sense- impressions no ideas, without education, few ideas, the mind of a man grown up in isolation remains entirely undevel- oped; and since the soul is entirely dependent on the bodily organs, along with which it originates, grows, and declines, it is subject to mortality. Not only animals, as Descartes has shown, but men, who differ from the brutes only in degree, are mere machines; by the soul we mean that part of the body which thinks, and the brain has fine muscles for thinking as the leg its coarse ones for walking. If man is nothing but body, there is no other pleasure than that of the body. There is a difference, however, between sensuous pleasure, which is intense and brief, and intellectual pleasure, which is calm and lasting. The edu- cated man will prefer the latter, and find in it a higher and more noble happiness; but nature has been just enough to grant the common multitude, in the coarser pleasures, a more easily attainable happiness. Enjoy the moment, till the farce of life is ended ! Virtue exists only in society, which restrains from evil by its laws, and incites to good by he had been drivem out of his native land and from Holland. On La Mettrie cf. Lange, History 0/ Materialism, vol. ii. pp. 49-91 ; and DuBois-Reymond's Address, 1875.