Natural determinism of desire

Natural determinism of desire is the doctrine Clement presents to Therese: individual passions and tastes are products of bodily organization and experience, not choices a person can simply remake. Its argument moves from explaining variation to rejecting punishment, and finally to excusing cruelty as Nature’s work. The passage therefore makes determinism both a challenge to conventional judgments and a rationale that can erase responsibility for injury to others.

Identity and central claim

Clement argues that tastes, including those society regards as bizarre or criminal, derive from the organization Nature gives each individual. In his account, a person cannot be required to alter an inclination merely because it conflicts with law or social convention; changing it might mean surrendering the happiness the law is supposed to protect. He also questions whether anyone has the power to remake their own disposition at all, comparing unusual tastes to physical conditions a person did not choose.

His position is not simply that people differ. It is a causal theory: bodily constitution shapes the way a person receives impressions, and those impressions help form ideas and desires. For Clement, the conduct later judged as virtue or vice follows from this prior organization. The individual appears less as an independent chooser than as the outcome of forces that precede deliberate decision.

Imagination, perception, and the formation of taste

Clement explains the distance between one person’s pleasure and another’s aversion through the imagination. External objects do not possess a single value that all observers must experience alike; the imagination receives and modifies them through the senses, then forms ideas according to the individual’s constitution. His analogy is a set of mirrors that present the same object in different ways: if each mirror could also create and feel, each would respond according to its own particular image. The comparison makes perception itself part of the causal chain linking bodily organization to desire.

The example of the rose clarifies the consequence. Even if three-quarters of people find its scent pleasing, that majority neither proves the scent universally agreeable nor gives it the right to condemn the remaining quarter who find it offensive. Common taste establishes conformity among those who share it, not the inherent superiority of what they like. Clement uses this distinction to contest the conversion of majority preference into a moral standard.

He further argues that tastes are formed through both constitution and early impressions. The organs that make a person susceptible to particular desires are fashioned before birth, while early encounters and overheard conversations contribute to the pattern. Once tastes have formed, he maintains, neither education nor good example can simply erase them. In his formulation, a person inclined toward vice will become vicious despite good education, while one disposed toward virtue will move toward it even without good example. Both, he says, act according to their organic structure and impressions from Nature.

Social judgment and the limits of punishment

From this account Clement draws a political and legal conclusion: people whose tastes depart from accepted prejudice should not be scolded or punished for the difference. He goes further, arguing that justice would require society to remove obstacles and provide means for satisfying such tastes without risk. He compares the person with an uncommon inclination to someone born blind or lame, or to a person suffering an illness: difference, in this view, calls for sympathy rather than blame.

This comparison challenges the assumption that an inclination becomes culpable simply because it concerns erotic pleasure or violates convention. Clement observes that unusual preferences in ordinary matters are generally tolerated, whereas erotic difference can provoke accusation and punishment. He presents that discrepancy as an injustice: the fact that a desire unsettles social norms does not, in his theory, make its possessor responsible for having it. His argument thus attacks the authority of law and custom to treat social disapproval as proof of moral guilt.

Yet the doctrine’s claim reaches beyond the rejection of prejudice. Clement treats organic constitution as an explanation for both virtue and vice, and on that basis denies that one deserves punishment more than the other deserves reward. This move places moral evaluation under pressure: if conduct follows inevitably from Nature and formative impressions, the grounds for praise, blame, and legal accountability all become uncertain. The passage makes that implication explicit when Clement imagines anatomical knowledge tracing differences in taste to bodily processes and asks what would then become of law, ethics, religion, and punishment.

From determinism to the defense of cruelty

The doctrine takes its most troubling turn when Clement applies it to the infliction of pain. He argues that a person seeking pleasure may seek the strongest possible stimulation, and that, for a pleasure-seeker who depends on the intensity of another person’s response, pain may produce a stronger impression than gentler treatment. From this reasoning he concludes that such a person will impose suffering when able, believing that the resulting intensity heightens his own pleasure.

Therese objects that these principles cultivate cruel tastes. Clement answers that people have no control over the passions Nature has placed in them, likening their force to a storm before which an oak bends. If Nature had not inspired a disposition, he claims, that disposition could not offend her; those who act on their passions are therefore involuntary instruments of Nature. When Therese raises the possibility that escalating violence could kill the person subjected to it, Clement accepts the consequence rather than treating it as a reason to stop. He recasts destruction as part of Nature’s process, comparing the breaking of matter into smaller pieces to a transformation rather than a crime.

That progression reveals the difference between explaining desire and vindicating action. The argument begins by resisting the unjust punishment of people for involuntary inclinations, but it then uses involuntariness to dismiss the consequences of conduct imposed on someone else. Clement’s claim that Nature stands behind desire becomes a warrant for disregarding the suffering that desire causes. The conceptual shift is central: a theory intended to unsettle conventional condemnation also offers the perpetrator a way to evade responsibility.

Narrative significance

The doctrine is delivered in a conversation with Therese, who reproaches Clement and challenges him when his reasoning turns toward cruelty and its potentially lethal consequences. Her interruptions keep the speech from functioning as an uncontested exposition: the account of determinism is staged alongside an ethical objection to what Clement makes of it. The contrast distinguishes Therese’s concern with the act and its consequences from Clement’s insistence that passions need not answer to consequences.

The passage’s structure follows the reach of the doctrine itself. It begins with differences of perception, moves to the formation of tastes, extends into the social treatment of people whose inclinations depart from the norm, and ends with the claim that even destructive conduct serves Nature. Natural determinism of desire is therefore more than a description of why tastes vary. It becomes a test of where explanation stops and excuse begins—and of what happens to ethical responsibility when the force of an individual’s desire is treated as sufficient justification for harm.