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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![present at the enchanting spectacle of the universe, and he will surely never destroy nature either in himself or in others. More than that! Full of humanity, this man will love human character even in his enemies. Judge how he will treat others. He will pity the wicked without hating them; in his eyes, they will be but mis-made men. But in pardoning the faults of the structure of mind and body, he will none the less admire the beauties and the virtues of both. Those whom nature shall have favored will seem to him to deserve more respect than those whom she has treated in stepmotherly fashion. Thus, as we have seen, natural gifts, the source of all acquirements, gain from the lips and heart of the materialist, the homage which every other thinker unjustly refuses them. In short, the materialist, convinced, in spite of the protests of his vanity, that he is but a machine or an animal, will not maltreat his kind, for he will know too well the nature of those actions, whose humanity is al- ways in proportion to the degree of the analogy proved above [between human beings and animals]; and following the natural law given to all animals, he will not wish to do to others what he would not wish them to do to him. Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified. This is no hypoth- esis set forth by dint of a number of postulates and assumptions; it is not the work of prejudice, nor even of my reason alone; I should have disdained a guide which I think to be so untrustworthy, had not my senses, bearing a torch, so to speak, induced me to follow reason by lighting the way themselves.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21172432_0164.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
