Julien Offray de La Mettrie Quotes on Nature
Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (L’homme machine, 1747) gave the mid-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment its most provocative early statement of mechanistic naturalism. The central thesis, presented in the title’s deliberately scandalous formula, extends the Cartesian analysis of animal automatism to the human animal as well: the mental life of human beings is the activity of an organized matter whose specific dispositions can be analyzed without remainder in physiological terms, and the Cartesian dualist exception for the rational soul is an ad hoc concession to theological rather than philosophical demands. The framework, which drove La Mettrie into Dutch and then Prussian exile under Frederick the Great, anticipated by a century the materialist physiology of the nineteenth century and the broader naturalistic philosophy of mind.
Quotes
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Attributed to Julien Offray de La Mettrie:
“Man is a machine.”
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Attributed to Julien Offray de La Mettrie:
“The soul is but the engine of the body.”
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Attributed to Julien Offray de La Mettrie:
“Materialism, far from undermining virtue, is its only honest foundation.”
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“Write as if thou wert alone in the universe and hadst nothing to fear from the jealousies and prejudices of the people. Otherwise thou wilt miss thy purpose.”
Preface, Oeuvres philosophiques de Monsieur de La Mettrie (1764) as quoted by Paul Carus , The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-mechanical (1913) p. 102. -
“Ch. III Concerning the Extension of Matter”
[B]efore Descartes , some of the ancients made the essence of matter consist in solid extension. But this opinion, of which all the Cartesians have made much, has at all times been victoriously combated... -
“Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter”
The ancients , persuaded that there is no body without a moving force, regarded the substance of bodies as composed of two primitive attributes . It was held that, through one of these attributes, this substance has the capacity for moving and , through the other, the capacity for being moved. -
“[I]f we demonstrate this moving principle , if we show that matter , far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?”
Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter -
“Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter”
[I]f we demonstrate this moving principle , if we show that matter , far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?