THE seamy side of virtue is its origin. Bernard Mandeville, author of "The Fable of the Bees," 1714, was interested in origins. He was a great anatomist of society who transferred to the study of human nature the physician's habit of tracing symptoms to the vital organs. He said: "One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves is that most writers are always teaching men what they should be and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they are." By a merciless probing to the source of social phenomena in the self-preservative and reproductive impulses of natural man, and in the cluster of elementary passions which branch immediately from those two impulses, he attempted to disclose the necessary final basis of morals and politics. In the process he deepened the channels of thought and imparted to his intelligent admirers a relish for coming to grips with reality.
But Mandeville was not merely a social anatomist. He was also a born man of letters with an exuberant personality, which he liked to express. He was no sour misanthrope but, as I take it, a rather hearty, burly fellow who enjoyed the excitement of ideas and the collision of minds. Yet with all his truculent aggressiveness he was a crafty, insidious ironist with a most irritating wit and a capacity for interesting in
