"These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)


Date
1748, 1749
Metaphor
"These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it."
Metaphor in Context
[...] These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it. One assisted the other; and the smallest beginnings increasing by degrees, every thing in the world came to be as easily distinguished, as the circumference of a circle.
(p. 26)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
4 entries in the ESTC. Published anonymously, translated into English in 1749 with printings in 1750 and 1752.

Text from Man a Machine. Translated from the French of the Marquiss D'Argens. (London: Printed for W. Owen, 1749). <Link to ECCO>

Reading Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). Translation based on version from La Mettrie's Oeuvres philosophiques (Berlin: 1751).
Date of Entry
07/16/2013

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.