  Holbach’s ethics is naturalistic in the sense described. Like his major influence in this area, Spinoza, he undertakes to explain human beings with the same clarity and rigor that others explain geometry (Eléments de la morale universelle, Preface). The laws that Holbach depends upon in accounting for human nature are primarily psychological laws and may be peculiar to human beings. For Holbach, like Spinoza and Hobbes, holds that each person seeks his own preservation (System of Nature, 40; cf, Spinoza’s Ethics IIIp9 and Hobbes’s De Homine, Chap. 11—Holbach’s is still the most widely available French translation of the latter). As both of these authors do, Holbach associates the ends of action also with happiness, so that happiness and self-preservation are, in his ethics, generally speaking related, and an individual’s interest is understood by Holbach in terms of either (and where he distinguishes between them, both) of these. 