On sera peut-être surpris que j'aie osé mettre mon nom à un livre aussi hardi que celui-ci. Je ne l'aurois certainementpas fait, si je n'avois cru la Religion à l'abri de toutes les tentatives qu'on fait pour la renverser; & si j'eusse pume persuader, qu'un autre Imprimeur n'eût pas fait très volontiers ce que j'aurois refusé par principe de conscience.Je sais que la Prudence veut qu'on ne donne pas occasion aux Esprits foibles d'être séduits. Mais en les supposant tel...

This recording has been digitally produced by DeepZen Limited, using a synthesized version of an audiobook narrator’s voice under license. DeepZen uses Emotive Speech Technology to create digital narrations that offer a similar listening experience to human narration."Man a Machine" by Julien Offray de La Mettrie is a provocative treatise from the Enlightenment period that challenges traditional distinctions between humans and machines. In this work, La Mettrie contends that humans...

Man a Machine is a work of materialist philosophy by the 18th-century French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, first published in 1747. In this work, de La Mettrie extends Descartes' argument that animals were mere automatons or machines to human beings, denying the existence of the soul as a substance separate from matter.

The French text presented in this volume is taken from that of a Leyden edition of 1748, in other words, from that of an edition published in the year and in the place of issue of the first edition. The title page of this edition is reproduced in the present volume. The original was evidently the work of a Dutch compositor unschooled in the French language, and is full of imperfections, inconsistencies, and grammatical blunders. By the direction of the publishers these obviously typographi...