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Marquis de Sade and the Enlightenment We are no guiltier in following the primitive impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her flood or the sea for her waves" - La Mettrie The eighteenth century embraced a secularized France in which the idea of utility, and ....

Middle of Essay
.... of the Church. Now, they were accountable to general society, and not the individual's demands. Voltaire writes, " Virtue and vice, moral good and evil, is then in any country what is useful or harmful to society…Virtue is the habit of doing those things which please men, and vice the habit of doing those things which displease men." Consequentially, virtue and vice were not set in stone decrees, but rather arbitrary notions assigned to the whims of society. This idea left no universal law of good and evil. The right of the individual to pursue pleasure and his notions of right and wrong were secondary to his obligation to society. Voltaire e ....