CHAP. XIV. Education, morals, and the laws suffice to restrain
man--of the desire of immortality--of suicide.

CHAP. XV. Of man's true interest, or of the ideas he forms to
himself of happiness.--Man cannot be happy without virtue.

CHAP. XVI. The errors of man.--Upon what constitutes happiness.--
The true source of his evils.--Remedies that may be applied.

CHAP. XVII. Those ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature,
are the only remedies for the evil of man.--Recapitulation.--
Conclusions of the First Part.




PREFACE

_The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The
pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his
infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent
prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders
him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He
resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a
dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity
obscure, it is vacillating and false:--He takes the tone of his ideas on
the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an
interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these
barriers to the improvement of his condition; to disentangle him from