The sensitive purity which Morellet notices, not without slight lifting
of the eyebrow, remained with Turgot throughout his life. This was the
more remarkable from the prevailing laxity of opinion upon this
particular subject, perhaps the worst blemish upon the feeling and
intelligence of the revolutionary schools. For it was not merely
libertines, like Marmontel, making a plea for their own dissoluteness,
who habitually spoke of these things with inconsiderate levity. Grave
men of blameless life, like Condorcet, deliberately argued in favour of
leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and
laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'[6] It
is true that at D'Holbach's house, the headquarters of the dogmatic
atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only
theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact
that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was
exceptional.[7] One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness
of continence was not treated as a superstition by those who vindicated
it as Turgot did, but discussed like any other virtue; and was defended
not as an intuition of faith, but as a reasoned conclusion of the
judgment. It was permitted to occupy no solitary and mysterious throne,
apart and away from other conditions and parts of human excellence and
social wellbeing. There is intrinsically no harm in any virtue being
accepted in the firm shape of a simple prejudice. On the contrary, there
is a multitude of practical advantages in such a consolidated and
spontaneously working order. But in considering conduct and character,
and forming an opinion upon infractions of a virtue, we cannot be just
unless we have analysed its conditions, and this is what the eighteenth
century did defectively with regard to that particular virtue which so
often usurps the name of all of the virtues together. In this respect
Turgot's original purity of character withdrew him from the error of the
time.