 Diderot explicitly eschews the natural ties that many see tying a materialist conception of human being directly and naturally with libertinism, hedonism, and a purely self-interested and solipsistic conception of morality. This stance was reinforced in other ways by his counter-conception of natural morality, an ethics which he often celebrated in his writings about aesthetic representation and its value. At the center of the naturalism that Diderot claimed for this ethics was an implicit set of claims about experience, feeling, and action in human life. The natural principles of sensibility spoke directly to humans about the division between virtue and vice, or so Diderot believed, and while the virtuous individual was the one who submitted to the natural passions inherent in us pushing us toward camaraderie and filial love, the vicious soul was a willful and arrogant rebel who chases selfish desire and self-gratification against the grain of what is naturally good and true.