"Prejudices. They are to the mind what ministers are to monarchs. The latter prevent their rivals from approaching the king, and in the same way prejudices prevent truths from reaching the mind, for fear of losing the power they usurp over it."
One of the most widespread prejudices is that which considers it impossible to attain happiness; as that does not prevent us from desiring it, such an idea corrupts life and often renders it unbearable. Priests have believed that they could remedy this by inventing a second life, where the person who has consented to be quite unhappy in the first will find at last a sort of equivocal happiness, little calculated to tempt one of intelligence. The people, nevertheless, snap at this bait and accept, in view of future recompense, the direst tribulations of the present life. Thus a frightful slavery is perpetuated, for it is very evident that all this is nothing but a hoax and an imposition. Whoever wishes to taste happiness, if this word stands for anything more than a dream, should set about it in this life, since the other one is but a chimera, lucrative for the clergy alone. But how be happy? Through virtue? Very well, what is virtue?
"Virtue," replies Helvétius, "is only the wisdom which harmonizes passion with reason and pleasure with duty."
He assigns a large place in life to pleasures and passions; but he does not consider them only as elements of happiness; he makes of them sources of activity. Man instinctively seeks pleasure. When he has experienced it, and later loses it, he will work with all his might to win it anew. All forms of pleasure, then, are easily reconcilable to virtue. Who knows whether pleasure taken in wise moderation is not virtue itself? And he dares to write this maxim, which will perhaps frighten some: One is never guilty when one is happy. Helvétius, who was a very gentle and kind person, is often, in his writings, rashly bold. His intimate notes are violent, impassioned, even brutal. He speaks in them of love with magnificent frankness, and one readily divines that it is chiefly in the exercise of this amiable virtue that he found happiness.
I am not at all writing here a study of Helvétius, one of the most skilful demolishers of the ancient regime; I am running through a portfolio of private notes, printed at first in a few copies, and the reading of which will reveal at once an ingenious philosopher and the most spirited of poets. He is, on the subject of love, inexhaustible; he is in turn tender, subtle, passionate, raving. His delirious attacks are of a beautiful candor; the majority of his thoughts are charming and most seductive: "Each moment of pleasure is a gift of the gods."
This verse, which would be greatly admired and celebrated if it had been found in André Chenier,—does it truly come from the pen of Helvétius? This is what M. Albert Keim asks himself. That is a query to propound to the erudite spirits of l'Intermédiaire, who have read all the old authors; in the meantime I consider it as being highly characteristic of the philosophy and the poetry of the author of Bonheur (Happiness). One can imagine nothing more pagan, more gently anti-Christian. And anti-Christianism is the real basis of Helvétius' philosophy. He oversteps the bounds a trifle when he adds: "Pleasure is the sole occupation of life." The ardor of this young man is excessive. He himself will soon learn and declare that life has other employments, such, for example, as composing a philosophy.
His second motto will be: "Minerva and Venus in turn," which is wisdom itself; he will devote himself to plucking at once "the fruits of reason and the fruits of pleasure." He is forever recurring to voluptuousness, whose images pursue him: "Who takes all pleasures takes very few of them." Love to him is the most noble of passions because it is the fecund passion and mother of life. This is what makes him say: "It is not, moreover, without a certain secret melancholy," for, he avers, "The flower that one plucks is ready to wither."
Do you wish to see him in his rôle of a serious philosopher? He will say, as if he foresaw the war against science, in which, in our own days, we have seen the Veuillots and the Brunetières distinguish themselves: "There are things over which the veil of skepticism should be spread; but, in the matter of science, it would be necessary, in order to win the right of skepticism, to know all that the human mind may learn: then one might permit himself to declare that science is nothing." Like the modern positivists, like Renan, remarks M. Keim, Helvétius had the greatest confidence in science. He is forever celebrating the triumphs of human intelligence. He believes in progress, in the transformation of society by the scientific mind. Thus he launched a powerful attack against Rousseau's thesis upon the ills of civilization. Yet at times one notes in him a little discouragement, and he will confess: "Almost all philosophical views are worthless. Not that they are not excellent, but because there are too few persons who can understand them."
The number of persons who can understand Helvétius has greatly increased, and besides, it is not so difficult as he believed; all one needs is a little common sense. It is a good sign of our intellectual health that Helvétius is coming back into fashion. Tomorrow it will be d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Tracy, the master of Stendhal,—all those eighteenth-century philosophers who are so clear, so simple, so human. The absurd German metaphysics has annihilated them for sixty years, but it seems that the day of their revenge has come. The dry notion of abstract duty according to Kant has outlived its day. It is beginning to be understood that man's first duty is to be happy. Otherwise, what is the use of living?