232 Science Religion and Reality 



Julien de la Mettrie. It is composed in support of a very crude 

 mechanistic view which attributes all thought to brain processes, 

 but it is written in a sprightly style, as the following quotations 

 show : 



" The body may be considered a clock and the fresh chyle we 

 may look on as the spring of that clock. The first business of 

 nature upon the entrance of the chyle into the blood is to raise a 

 sort of fever which the chemists (who dream of nothing but furnaces) 

 call a fermentation." 



" Let us conclude boldly then that man is a machine, and that 

 there is only one substance, differently modified, in the whole world. 

 What will all the weak reeds of divinity, metaphysic, and nonsense 

 of the schools, avail against this firm and solid oak ? " 



As might have been expected, an anonymous reply to this work 

 appeared a year or two later. A pamphlet of about the same length, 

 called " Man more than a Machine," was published with an 

 almost identical title-page, " in Answer to a Wicked and a 

 Atheistical Treatise written by M. de la Mettrie." Its style is 

 not so good, but it makes amusing reading, for the author takes all 

 de la Mettrie's points and endeavours to confute them one by one. 

 Here is a sample : 



" The physician's ignorance of logic renders him subject to 

 numberless errors which he readily swallows down for want of 

 the art of drawing just conclusions. He observes that a medicine 

 which restores a sick person to health has sometimes the effect that 

 it changes a blockhead into a man of sense. Nothing more is 

 wanting for him to conclude that man is no more than a watch 

 and that it is sufficient that his spring and wheels be in good order 

 to render him reasonable." " Let a man eat and drink as plenti- 

 fully and as long as he will ; let a new chyle support him for sixty 

 years successively, he will not in this respect be more than a plant 

 or a tree supplied continually with fresh juices." 



In this way the polemic was prolonged, on the mechanistic 

 side by d'Holbach and Cabanis, to whom is due the statement that 

 the " brain produces thought in the same way as the stomach and 

 intestines operate in digestion, the liver filters the bile and the sub- 

 maxillary gland secretes the saliva," and on the vitalistic side by 

 Barthez, Bordeu, and Chaussier. An echo of their contention 

 is found in the " Religio Medici " of Sir Thomas Browne, though 



