On Crimes and Punishments

Book are founded on confused notions, and they oblige me to interrupt my reasoning for a moment for the sake of enlightened Readers, in order to close off, once and for all, any access to the errors of a timid zeal, or to the slanders of malicious envy.

There are three sources from which the moral and political principles that regulate men derive: Revelation, Natural Law, and the artificial Conventions of Society. There is no comparison between the first and the others in relation to its principal end, but they resemble one another in this: they all three lead to the happiness of this mortal life. To consider the relationships of the latter is not to exclude the relationships of the first two; rather, so-