Materialism; Mind and body; Physiology -- Early works to 1800
18. Luzac sums up the preceding facts by saying: "Here are a great
many facts, but what is it they prove? only that the faculties of the
soul arise, grow, and acquire strength in proportion as the body does;
so that these same faculties are weakened in the same proportion as
the body is.... But from all these circumstances it does not follow
that the faculty of thinking is an attribute of matter, and that all
depends on the manner in which our machine is made, that the faculties
of the soul arise from a principle of animal life, from an innate
heat or force, from an irritability of the finest parts of the body,
from a subtil ethereal matter diffused through it, or in a word,
from all these things taken together." [78]
19. "The diverse states of the soul are therefore always correlative
with those of the body." This view is in diametrical opposition to
the teaching of Descartes, who says: "The soul is of a nature wholly
independent of the body." [79] Yet Descartes also states that there is
an intimate connection between the two. "The Reasonable Soul ... could
by no means be educed from the power of matter ... it must be expressly
created; and it is not sufficient that it be lodged in the human body,
exactly like a pilot in a ship, unless perhaps to move its members,
but ... it is necessary for it to be joined and united more closely to
the body, in order to have sensations and appetites similar to ours,
and thus constitute a real man." [79]
Holbach later emphasizes this close connection between body and soul,
which is so insisted upon by La Mettrie. "If freed from our prejudices
we wish to see our soul, or the moving principle which acts in us, we
shall remain convinced that it is part of our body, that it can not
be distinguished from the body except by an abstraction, that it is
but the body itself considered relatively to some of the functions
or faculties to which its nature and particular organization make
it susceptible. We shall see that this soul is forced to undergo
the same changes as the body, that it grows and develops with the
body.... Finally we can not help recognizing that at some periods it
shows evident signs of weakness, sickness, and death." [80]
20. "Peyronie (François Gigot de la), a French surgeon, born in
Montpellier, the fifteenth of January, 1678, died the twenty-fifth
of April, 1747. He was surgeon of the hospital of Saint-Eloi de
Montpellier and instructor of anatomy to the Faculty; then, in 1704,
served in the army. In 1717 he became reversioner of the position of
first surgeon to Louis XV; in 1731, steward of the Queen's palace;
in 1735, a doctor of the King; in 1736, first surgeon of the King,
and chief of the surgeons of the kingdom. The greatest merit of
La Peyronie is for having founded the Academy of Surgery in Paris,
and for having gained special protection for surgery and surgeons in
France. He wrote little." [81]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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