Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach · 1770
The System of Nature
- Original title
- Système de la nature
- Language
- French
- Form
- Treatise
- Text
- Full text
- English
- No English translation · Yes: H. D. Robinson translation (1868), Project Gutenberg #8909 and archive.org systemofnature00holb
- Source text
- gutenberg.org
- Selected
- Ben Breen, 2026-09-29; suggested by Claude research agents, 29 Sep 2026
- Status
- Arguments unverified; quotations chosen by machine, unchecked
Q05AUTOMATON
Can human choices be fully explained by physical causes?Yes. choices are necessary effects of physical causes. Man is part of nature and every act of will is determined by motives that act on the brain, so free agency is an illusion.
Man, then, is not a free agent in any one instant of his life; he is necessarily guided in each step by those advantages, whether real or fictitious, that he attaches to the objects by which his passions are roused: these passions themselves are necessary in a being who, unceasingly tends towards his own happiness; their energy is necessary, since that depends on his temperament; his temperament is necessary, because it depends on the physical elements which enter into his composition; the modification of this temperament is necessary, as it is the infallible result, the inevitable consequence of the impulse he receives from the incessant action of moral and physical beings.
Part I, ch. XI, 'Of the System of Man's Free Agency' · Web search confirms the chapter title in the Robinson translation on Project Gutenberg; archive.org record for an 1889 printing.
Sometimes in dreaming, he has memory, then he retraces to himself the objects which have struck him faithfully;--at other times, these modifications renew themselves without order, and without connection, very differently from those, which real objects have before excited in his interior organ. If in a dream he believes he sees a friend, his brain renews in itself the modifications or the ideas which this friend had formerly excited--in the same order that they arranged themselves when his eyes really beheld him--this is nothing more than an effect of memory. If in his dream he fancies he sees a monster which has no model in nature, his brain is then modified in the same manner that it was by the particular, by the detached ideas, with which it then does nothing more than compose an ideal whole; by assembling, and associating, in a ridiculous manner, the scattered ideas that were consigned to its keeping; it is then, that in dreaming he has imagination.Retained as a reserve/context passage for the original question; no stronger alternative placement established.