"I always use the word imagine, because I am of the opinion that everything is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul may be justly reduced to the imagination only, which forms them all; and thus the judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute faculties of the soul, but real modifications of this kind of medullary substance, on which the objects painted in the eye are reflected, as from a magic lanthorn."
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Work Title
Date
1748, 1749
Metaphor
"I always use the word imagine, because I am of the opinion that everything is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul may be justly reduced to the imagination only, which forms them all; and thus the judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute faculties of the soul, but real modifications of this kind of medullary substance, on which the objects painted in the eye are reflected, as from a magic lanthorn."
Metaphor in Context
I always use the word imagine, because I am of the opinion that everything is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul may be justly reduced to the imagination only, which forms them all; and thus the judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute faculties of the soul, but real modifications of this kind of medullary substance, on which the objects painted in the eye are reflected, as from a magic lanthorn.
(p. 28)
(p. 28)
Provenance
Reading; found again reading John Dussinger's The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction ( The Hague: Moton & Co., 1974), p. 44.
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).
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
