Though he acknowledges pleasure to be the law of life, yet he is far from regarding its attainment as the end of life.
Richelieu's position was much strengthened by these incidents, but to the end of life he had to struggle against conspiracies which were designed to deprive him of the king's support, and usually Gaston of Orleans had some share in these movements.
The ethics of these principles were worked out in Discours sur le bonheur, La Volupte, and L' Art de jouir, in which the end of life is found in the pleasures of the senses, and virtue is reduced to self-love.
The history of witchcraft in Europe and its attendant horrors, so vividly painted in Lecky's Rise of Rationalism, are but echoes of this universal refusal of savage man to accept death as the natural end of life.
The natural end of life is that all the organs should become old and gradually decay at the same time, so that at the last the individual should become less and less active, weaker and weaker, and finally die without any definite disease, without pain and without struggle.