conducive of superstition and thereby leads back again to the authority of priestcraft. Even the so-called natural religion is dangerous; for religion, no matter what the form, must necessarily have a form of worship, and the institution of forms of worship involves submission to the authority of priests. The formation of the concepts of deity is the product of a profound politics on the part of the theologians, those fabricateurs de la divinité!
Helvetius ' (1715-1771) theory of the original equality of all men, as respects nature and talent, is in a certain sense closely related to Condillac's doctrine of the passivity of all psychic life. All distinctions are due to external causes, to education in its widest sense, i. e. to all the influences which affect us. Education is responsible for the tendency which claims our interest and attention. No two men ever receive precisely the same kind of education. The only motive is self-interest, and whether it shall be actuated by great or small ideas depends entirely upon education (De l'esprit, 1758). Helvetius' posthumous work De l'homme(1773) is a polemic, based on the foregoing presuppositions, against the distinction between private and public interests, a distinction which is favored by despotic forms of government, and to which he attributes the misfortune of his native land. This last observation is of fundamental importance for the understanding of Helvetius. He was a tender-hearted, patriotic spirit, who devoted his vast fortune, acquired as Farmer- general, to the service of literature and philanthropy.
The profoundest thinker of this whole group was Dems Diderot (1713-1784), renowned as the energetic editor of the great Encyclopedia on account of which the French philosophers of the Enlightenment were called Encyclopedists. Diderot could only express his own ideas in-
