Julien Offray de La Mettrie: Matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was French physician and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on matter.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie: 84   quotes 2   likes

“We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Feeling , Knowledge

“This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Context: [W]e must admit, with the same frankness, that we are ignorant whether matter has in itself the faculty of feeling, or only the power of acquiring it by those modifications or forms to which matter is susceptible; for it is true that this faculty of feeling appears only in organic bodies.
This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others which have been mentioned; and this was the hypothesis of the ancients, whose philosophy, full of insight and penetration, deserves to be raised above the ruins of the philosophy of the moderns.<!--p.160

“[I]f we demonstrate this moving principle, if we show that matter, far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

Indifference

“There comes up another difficulty which more nearly concerns our vanity: namely, the impossibility of our conceiving this property [the faculty of feeling] as a dependence or attribute of matter.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Feeling , Dependency

“[B]efore Descartes, some of the ancients made the essence of matter consist in solid extension. But this opinion, of which all the Cartesians have made much, has at all times been victoriously combated…”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. III Concerning the Extension of Matter

Time , Victory

“The Christian Scholastics… might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Gen. i; Is. lxvi
Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

God