Date: 1748, 1749

"If a person is said to have but little judgment with a strong imagination, this is as much to say, that the imagination being too much abandoned to itself, and almost constantly employed in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations, has not sufficiently contracted the habit of examining ...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Like that bird on yonder spray, the imagination seems to be perpetually ready to take wing."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Hurried with incessant rapidity by the vortex of blood and animal spirits, one undulation makes an impression, which is immediately effaced by another; the soul pursues it, but often in vain: she must wait to bewail the loss of what she did not quickly lay hold of; and thus it is that the imagin...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"There is, say they, a law of nature, a knowledge of right and wrong deeply imprinted on the mind of man, which, in other animals, is not perceived."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Have we one argument of this sort to convince us that man alone is enlighten'd with the rays of reason, from which all other creatures are excluded?"

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Man is fram'd of materials, not exceeding in value those of other animals; nature has made use of one and the same paste, she has only diversify'd the ferment in working it up."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"If reason is the slave of depraved, or distracted sense, how then can it be expected, that at that time it should be governor?"

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The sun, the air, the water, the organization and form of bodies, are all rang'd in order in the eye, as in a looking-glass, which represents to the imagination the pictures of all the objects painted there, according to the laws of vision, which prevail amongst that numberless variety of partic...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The eye is, in reality, a sort of peep-hole, thro' which the soul can view the images of objects, according as they are represented from different bodies."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)