He thought that aided by science and learning man might reach a state based on communism, resembling the state of nature but more perfect, and he planned an ideal constitution in his romance of the Floating Islands.

[Footnote: Naufrage des isles flottantes ou Basiliade du celebre Pilpai (1753).

It begins: "je chante le regne aimable de la Verite et de la Nature." Morelly's other work, Code de la Nature, appeared in 1755.] Different as these views were, they represent the idea of regress; they imply a condemnation of the tendencies of actual social development and recommend a return to simpler and more primitive conditions.
Even Diderot, though he had little sympathy with Utopian speculations, was attracted by the idea of the simplification of society, and met Rousseau so far as to declare that the happiest state was a mean between savage and civilised life.
"I am convinced," he wrote, "that the industry of man has gone too far and that if it had stopped long ago and if it were possible to simplify the results, we should not be the worse.

I believe there is a limit in civilisation, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined; but how to return to it, having left it, or how to remain in it, if we were there?
I know not." [Footnote: Refutation de l'ouvrage d'Helvetius in OEuvres ii.p.431.Elsewhere (p.

287) he argues that in a community without arts and industries there are fewer crimes than in a civilised state, but men are not so happy.] His picture of the savages of Tahiti in the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville was not seriously meant, but it illustrates the fact that in certain moods he felt the fascination of Rousseau's Arcadia.
D'Holbach met all these theories by pointing out that human development, from the "state of nature" to social life and the ideas and commodities of civilisation, is itself natural, given the innate tendency of man to improve his lot.