That is a mere chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason.

Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more often than to suffer is what constitutes well-being." D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading.

From his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the savage state.

Here he was at one with Aristotle.
All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon him.

All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of what universal nature has made us.