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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![more so by living with others like themselves. But a gentle and peaceful animal which lives among other animals of the same disposition and of gentle nurture, will be an enemy of blood and carnage; it will blush internally at having shed blood. There is perhaps this difference, that since among animals everything is sacrificed to their needs, to their pleas- ures, to the necessities of life, which they enjoy more than we, their remorse apparently should not be as keen as ours, because we are not in the same state of necessity as they. Custom perhaps dulls and perhaps stifles remorse as well as pleasures. But I will suppose for a moment that I am utterly mistaken in concluding that almost all the world holds a wrong opinion on this subject, while I alone am right. I will grant that animals, even the best of them, do not know the difference between moral good and evil, that they have no recollection of the trouble taken for them, of the kindness done them, no realization of their own virtues. [I will suppose], for instance, that this lion, to which I, like so many others, have referred, does not remember at all that it refused to kill the man, abandoned to its fury, in a combat more inhuman than one could find among lions, tigers and bears, put together. For our com- patriots fight, Swiss against Swiss, brother against brother, recognize each other, and yet capture and kill each other without remorse, because a prince pays for the murder. I suppose in short that the natural law has not been given animals. What will be the consequences of this supposition? Man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven. Therefore if animals do not repent for having vie-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21172432_0133.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
