Man a machine / by Julien Offray de La Mettrie. French-English ; including Frederick the Great's "Eulogy" on La Mettrie and extracts from La Mettrie's "The natural history of the soul" ; philosophical and historical notes by Gertrude Carman Bussey.
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
- Date:
- 1912
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Man a machine / by Julien Offray de La Mettrie. French-English ; including Frederick the Great's "Eulogy" on La Mettrie and extracts from La Mettrie's "The natural history of the soul" ; philosophical and historical notes by Gertrude Carman Bussey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![selves attentively. [It means that the imagination] has been more impressed by images than by their truth or their likeness. Truly, so quick are the responses of the imagina- tion that if attention, that key or mother of the sciences, does not do its part, imagination can do little more than run over and skim its objects. See that bird on the bough: it seems always ready to fly away. Imagination is like the bird, always carried onward by the turmoil of the blood and the animal spirits. One wave leaves a mark, effaced by the one that follows; the soul pursues it, often in vain: it must expect to regret the loss of that which it has not quickly enough seized and fixed. Thus, imagination, the true image of time, is being cease- lessly destroyed and renewed. Such is the chaos and the continuous quick suc- cession of our ideas: they drive each other away even as one wave yields to another. Therefore, if imagination does not, as it were, use one set of its muscles to maintain a kind of equilibrium with the fibres of the brain, to keep its attention for a while upon an object that is on the point of disappearing, and to prevent itself from contemplating prema- turely another object—[unless the im.agination does all this], it will never be worthy of the fine name of judgment. It will express vividly what it has perceived in the same fashion: it will create orators, musicians, painters, poets, but never a single philos- opher. On the contrary, if the imagination be trained from childhood to bridle itself and to keep from being carried away by its own impetuosity— an impetuosity which creates only brilliant enthu- siasts—and to check, to restrain, its ideas, to exam-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21172432_0128.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
