Man a Machine

"Yet the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most forcefully in 1751, long before the theory of evolution became generally accepted, by de La Mettrie; and the theory of evolution gave the problem an even sharper edge, by suggesting there may be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter. And, in spite of the victory of the new quantum theory and the conversion of so many physicists to indeterminism, de La Mettrie's doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer."

"I believe that thought is so little incompatible with organized matter, that it seems to be one of its properties on a par with electricity, the faculty of motion, impenetrability, extentension, etc."

"We are veritable moles in the field of nature; we achieve little more than the mole's journey and it is our pride which prescribes limits to the limitless."

"[W]e disdain, ungrateful wretches that we are, this common mother of all kingdoms... We imagine, or rather we infer, a cause superior to that to which we owe all, and which truly has wrought all things in an inconceivable fashion."

"[M]atter contains nothing base, except to the vulgar eyes which do not recognize her in her most splendid works... Her power shines forth equally in creating the lowliest insect and in creating the most highly developed man; the animal kingdom costs her no more than the vegetable, and the most splendid genius no more than a blade of wheat."

"Let us observe the ape, the beaver, the elephant, etc., in their operations. If it is clear that these activities can not be performed without intelligence, why refuse intelligence to these animals?"

"[W]ho does not see that the soul of an animal must be either mortal or immortal, whichever ours [is]... and that thus [in admitting that animals have souls], you fall into in the effort to avoid ?"

"Break the chain of your prejudices, arm yourselves with the torch of experience, and you will render to nature the honor she deserves... Only open wide your eyes, only disregard what you can not understand, and you will see that the ploughman whose intelligence and ideas extend no further than the bounds of his furrow, does not differ essentially from the greatest genius,—a truth which the dissection of Descartes's and of Newton's brains would have proved; you will be persuaded that the imbecile and the fool are animals with human faces, as the intelligent ape is a little man in another shape..."

"Let us not say that every machine or every animal perishes altogether or assumes another form after death, for we know absolutely nothing about the subject."

"[T]o assert that an immortal machine is a chimera or a logical fiction, is to reason as absurdly as caterpillars would reason if, seeing the cast-off skins of their fellow-caterpillars, they should bitterly deplore the fate of their species, which to them would seem to come to nothing."

"What more do we know of our destiny than of our origin? Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends."

"He who so thinks will be wise, just, tranquil about his fate, and therefore happy. He will await death without either fear or desire, and will cherish life... filled with reverence, gratitude, affection, and tenderness for nature, in proportion to his feeling of the benefits he has received from nature; he will be happy, in short, in feeling nature, and in being present at the enchanting spectacle of the universe, and he will surely never destroy nature either in himself or in others."

"Full of humanity, this man will love human character even in his enemies. He will pity the wicked without hating them... [as] mis-made men. ...[T]he materialist, convinced, in spite of the protests of his vanity, that he is but a machine or an animal, will not maltreat his kind... he will not wish to do to others what he would not want them to do to him."

"[M]an is a machine... in the whole universe there is but a single Substance differently modified. ...Experience has thus spoken to me in behalf of reason; and in this way I have combined the two. ...Against so strong and solid an oak, what could the weak reeds of theology, of metaphysics, and of the schools, avail... Need I say that I refer to the empty and trivial notions, to the pitiable and trite arguments that will be urged (as long as the shadow of prejudice or of superstition remains on earth) for the supposed incompatibility of two substances which meet and move each other unceasingly?"

"Such is my system, or rather the truth, unless I am much deceived. It is short and simple. Dispute it now who will."

"In very different fashion does the book set to work that already in its very title declares that man is a machine. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' was cautious, cunningly arranged, and only gradually surprising us with its results, here, on the contrary,the final conclusion is expressed at the outset of the work. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' allied itself with the whole Aristotelian metaphysics only in order to prove by degrees that the soul is but an empty form, into which we may pour a materialistic content, here we no longer deal in all those fine distinctions."

"Opium is too closely related to the sleep it produces... This drug intoxicates, like wine, coffee, etc., each in its own measure and according to the dose. It makes a man happy in a state which would seemingly be the tomb of feeling, as it is the image of death."

"The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement. Without food, the soul pines away, goes mad, and dies exhausted. ...[H]eavy food makes a dull and heavy mind whose usual traits are laziness and indolence. ...We think we are, and in fact we are, good men, only as we are gay or brave; everything depends on the way our machine is running."

"One is sometimes inclined to say that the soul is situated in the stomach, and that Van Helmont, who said that the seat of the soul was in the , made only the mistake of taking the part for the whole."

"One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason."

"The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education."

"The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. ...[W]e catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc... the body of the spectator mechanically imitates, in spite of himself, all the motions of a good mimic."

"[A] brilliant man is his own best company, unless he can find other company of the same sort. In the society of the unintelligent, the mind grows rusty for lack of exercise..."

"I should prefer an intelligent man without an education, if he were still young enough, to a man badly educated. A badly trained mind is like an actor whom the provinces have spoiled."

"Thus the diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body."

"In general, the form and the structure of the brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of man... with this essential difference, that of all the animals man is the one whose brain is largest, and, in proportion to its mass, more convoluted... then come the monkey, the beaver, the elephant, the dog, the fox, the cat. These animals are most like man, for among them, too, one notes the same progressive analogy in relation to the ' in which Lancisi—anticipating the late M. de la Peyronie—established the seat of the soul. The latter, however, illustrated the theory by innumerable experiments."

"I shall draw the conclusions... 1st, that the fiercer animals are, the less brain they have; 2d, that this organ seems to increase in size in proportion to the gentleness of the animal; 3d, that nature seems here eternally to impose a singular condition, that the more one gains in intelligence the more one loses in instinct. Does this bring gain or loss? Do not think, however, that I wish to infer by that, that the size alone of the brain, is enough to indicate the degree of tameness in animals..."

"A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues."

"Willis has noticed in addition to the softness of the brain-substance in children, puppies, and birds, that the corpora striata are obliterated and discolored in all these animals, and that the striations are as imperfectly formed as in paralytics..."

"[S]o many different varieties can not be the gratuitous play of nature. They prove at least the necessity for a good and vigorous physical organization, since throughout the animal kingdom the soul gains force with the body and acquires keenness, as the body gains strength."

"Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet can not learn music. What is the reason for this... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so. ...I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old... Would not Amman too have passed for mad if he had boasted that he could instruct scholars like his in so short a time, before he had happily accomplished the feat? ...Amman's discoveries are certainly of a much greater value; he has freed men from the instinct to which they seemed to be condemned, and has given them ideas, intelligence, or in a word, a soul which they would never have had. What greater power than this!"

"Locke, who was certainly never suspected of credulity, found no difficulty in believing the story told by Sir William Temple in his memoirs, about a parrot which could answer rationally, and which had learned to carry on a kind of connected conversation, as we do."

"Whoever owes the miracles that he works to his own genius surpasses... the man who owes his to chance. He who has discovered the art of adorning the most beautiful of the kingdoms [of nature], and of giving it perfections that it did not have, should be rated above an idle creator of frivolous systems, or a painstaking author of sterile discoveries."

"Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art."

"What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal of his own species with much less instinct than the others. ...the same, old as young, child at all ages, he lisped out his sensations and his needs, as a dog ...asks for something to eat, or for a walk."

"Words, languages, laws, sciences, and the fine arts have come, and by them finally the rough diamond of our mind has been polished. Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they became beasts of burden."

"A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on... All has been accomplished through signs, every species has learned what it could understand, and in this way men have acquired symbolic knowledge..."

"But who was the first to speak? Who was the first teacher of the human race? ...[T]he names of these first splendid geniuses have been lost in the night of time. But art is the child of nature, so nature must have long preceded it."

"As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them."

"[T]he sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra."

"[I]t is comparatively rare to imagine a thing without the name or sign that is attached to it."

"[E]verything is the work of imagination, and that all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination in which they all consist. Thus judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute parts of the soul, but merely modifications of this kind of medullary screen upon which images of the objects painted in the eye are projected as by a ."

"[W]hy should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? Is not this a clear inconsistency in the partisans of the simplicity of the mind? For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible. See to what one is brought by the abuse of language and by those fine words (spirituality, immateriality, etc.) used haphazard and not understood even by the most brilliant."

"[I]magination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul."

"By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets. ...it can not reflect on what it has mechanically conceived, without thus being judgment itself."

"The more the imagination or the poorest talent is exercised, the more it gains in embonpoint... and the larger it grows. It becomes sensitive, robust, broad, and capable of thinking. The best of organisms has need of this exercise."

"Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are."

"Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs."

"If one's organism is an advantage, and the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it... But if the brain is at the same time well organized and well educated, it is a fertile soil, well sown, that brings forth a hundredfold what it has received... and takes in easily an astounding number of objects, in order to deduce from them a long chain of consequences, which are again but new relations, produced by a comparison with the first, to which the soul finds a perfect resemblance. Such is... the generation of intelligence."

"I say of truth in general what M. de Fontenelle says of certain truths in particular, that we must sacrifice it in order to remain on good terms with society. ...The Cartesians would here in vain make an onset upon me with their innate ideas. I certainly would not give myself a quarter of the trouble that M. Locke took, to attack such chimeras. In truth, what is the use of writing a ponderous volume to prove a doctrine which became an axiom three thousand years ago?"