Date: 1664

"I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Indeed, one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water which drives them, the heart with the source of the ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"And finally, when a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain-keeper who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain's pipes return if he wants to produce, or prevent, or change their movements in some way."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Now I maintain that when God unites a rational soul to this machine (in a way that I intend to explain later) he will place its principal seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to th...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"You can think of our machine's heart and arteries, which push the animal spirits into the cavities of its brain, as being like the bellows of an organ, which push air into the wind-chests; and you can think of external objects, which stimulate certain nerves and cause spirits contained in the ca...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"I should like you to consider, after this, all the functions I have ascribed to this machine -- such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, so...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The former have explored and unravelled the labyrinth of Man. They alone have discovered to us those hidden springs concealed under a cover, which hides from us so many wonders."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Man is a machine so compound, that it is impossible to form at first a clear idea thereof, and consequently to define it. This is the reason, that all the enquiries the philosophers have made a priori, that is, by endeavouring to raise themselves on the wings of the understanding have proved ine...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"In proportion as the motion of the blood grows calm, a soft soothing sense of peace and tranquility spreads itself over the whole machine; the soul finds itself sweetly weighed down with slumber, and sinks with the fibres of the brain: it becomes thus paralytic as it were, by degrees, together w...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)