Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/20

 pleasure; but in saying this we have indicated where the principle of all morality is to be sought. It is an absurdity to require a man to do the good simply for its own sake. . . . Hence if morality would not be wholly fruitless, it must return to its empirical basis, and venture to adopt the true principle of all action; namely, sensuous pleasure and pain, or, in other words, selfishness as an actual moral principle."

La Mettrie, who died in 1751, declared everything spiritual to be a delusion, and physical enjoyment to be the highest end of man. He says,—

"Faith in the existence of a God is as groundless as it is fruitless. The world will not be happy till atheism becomes universally established. . . . In reference to the human soul there can be no philosophy but materialism. All the observation and experience of the greatest philosophers and physicians declare this. Soul is nothing but a mere name, which has a rational signification only when we understand by it that part of our body which thinks. This is the brain. . . . Immortality is an absurdity. The soul perishes with the body of which it forms a part. With death everything is over: la farce est jouée!"

Whether in grim humor or in earnest, it was in perfect keeping with the times that Cabanis was said to have discovered religion and poetry to be the product, some say function, of the small intestines. Well might Carlyle say, in his Life of Frederick the Great, —

"A century so opulent in accumulated falsities,—sad opulence, descending on it by inheritance, always at compound interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such immensity of standing capital,—opulent in that bad way as never century before was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false, so false had it grown; and was so steeped in falsity, and impregnated with it to the very bone,