[WT Sharpe]

.....The only vice that I know in the universe is avarice. All the others, whatever names they may be given, are only forms and degrees of that. It is the Proteus, the Mercury, the foundation, the vehicle of all the vices. Analyse vanity, fatuity, pride, ambition, villainy, hypocrisy, viciousness; decompose in the same way the greater part of our sophistic virtues; everything resolves itself into this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess.
..........— Morelly, Code of Nature (1755), pages 15-16. Quoted in The Social & Political Ideas of Some Great French Thinkers of the Age of Reason: A Series of Lectures Delivered at King's College, University of London, during the Session 1928-29, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw M.A. LL.D. (George G. Harrap & Co. LTD., London, 1930), Chapter IX: "IX Morelly and Mably," by C. H. Driver, M.A., Assistant Lecturer in History at King's College, London, page 224.
.....Very little is known of Morelly's life, or even if the works attributed to him were the works of one author, or of a father and son. His Code of Nature was for many years falsely attributed to Diderot. He was probably born at Vitry-le-François, France, in the first part of the eighteenth century.