Thus mans preservation, and the unfolding of his faculties, directed towards this end, teach the true law of nature in the production of the human being; and it is from this essential principle that are derived, are referred, and in its scale are weighed, all ideas of good and evil, of vice and virtue, of just and unjust, of truth or error, of lawful or forbidden, on which is founded the morality of individual, or of social man.

CHAPTER IV.

Basis of morality; of good, of evil, of sin, of crime, of vice and of virtue.

Q. What is good, according to the law of nature?

A. It is everything that tends to preserve and perfect man.

Q. What is evil?

A. That which tends to man’s destruction or deterioration.

Q. What is meant by physical good and evil, and by moral good and evil?

A. By the word physical is understood, whatever acts immediately on the body.  Health is a physical good; and sickness a physical evil.  By moral, is meant what acts by consequences more or less remote.  Calumny is a moral evil; a fair reputation is a moral good, because both one and the other occasion towards us, on the part of other men, dispositions and habitudes,* which are useful or hurtful to our preservation, and which attack or favor our means of existence.

     * It is from this word habitudes, (reiterated actions,) in
     Latin mores, that the word moral, and all its family, are
     derived.

Q. Everything that tends to preserve, or to produce is therefore a good?

A. Yes; and it is for that reason that certain legislators have classed among the works agreeable to the divinity, the cultivation of a field and the fecundity of a woman.

Q. Whatever tends to cause death is, therefore, an evil?

A. Yes; and it is for that reason some legislators have extended the idea of evil and of sin even to the killing of animals.

Q. The murdering of a man is, therefore, a crime in the law of nature?

A. Yes, and the greatest that can be committed; for every other evil can be repaired, but murder alone is irreparable.

Q. What is a sin in the law of nature?

A. Whatever tends to disturb the order established by nature for the preservation and perfection of man and of society.

Q. Can intention be a merit or a crime?

A. No, for it is only an idea void of reality:  but it is a commencement of sin and evil, by the impulse it gives to action.

Q. What is virtue according to the law of nature?

A. It is the practice of actions useful to the individual and to society.

Q. What is meant by the word individual?

A. It means a man considered separately from every other.