Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

L'Homme machine [Man a Machine]

1748, 1749

"But if the brain be at the same time well framed and instructed, it is a fruitful and well sown soil, that produces a hundred fold to what it received."

But if the brain be at the same time well framed and instructed, it is a fruitful and well sown soil, that produces a hundred fold to what it received: or (to leave the figurative stile which is often necessary the better to express what we feel, and to give new graces to truth itself) imagination raised by art to the sublime and rare dignity of genius, apprehends exactly all the relations of the ideas it has conceiv'd, with facility comprehends an astonishing variety of objects, to infer from thence a long chain of consequences, which are still but new relations, produced by the comparison of the former, with which the soul finds a perfect resemblance. Such is, methinks, the generation of understanding. I say finds, as I gave before the epithet of apparent to the similitude of object. Not that I think our senses are always deceitful, as father Malebranche pretends, or that our eyes naturally somewhat fallacious, see not the objects such as they are in themselves, tho' microscopes prove it every day; but to have no dispute with the Pyrrhonists, amongst whom Mr. Bayle has distinguished himself.
(pp. 31-2)

Plant::Soil

Reading

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).

07/16/2013