Claude Adrien Helvétius

Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715 to 1771) was a French philosopher, Freemason and man of letters. Born in Paris into a family of physicians, he was trained for finance and became a farmer-general at twenty-three, a post that left him wealthy and free to write, while his wife kept a salon attended by the leading figures of the Enlightenment. His main work, De l'esprit (On Mind, 1758), argued that all human faculties come from physical sensation and that self-interest is the only real motive, so that morality is a matter of competing pleasures. Its atheistic, utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines caused a public outcry, the Sorbonne burned the book in 1759, and Helvétius was forced to issue several retractions.