Julien Offray de La Mettrie

French physician and philosopher

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Lived 1709–1751, aged 42France

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Era
1709–1751
Aged 42

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He wrote that humans are machines without souls — complex animals running on meat and nerve — and the backlash forced him out of France entirely.

Biography

About

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and philosopher who pushed Enlightenment materialism past the line polite society would tolerate. In 1747 he published L'homme machine, arguing that the mind is simply part of the body, that humans possess no immortal soul distinguishing them from other animals, and that life's proper aim is pleasure. The position made him one of the earliest French materialists and one of the most controversial: he had to flee France and settle in Berlin, where he died in 1751 at forty-one.

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

said1745

[B]efore Descartes, some of the ancients made the essence of matter consist in solid extension.

— Ch. III Concerning the Extension of Matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

said1745

The ancients, persuaded that there is no body without a moving force, regarded the substance of bodies as composed of two primitive attributes.

— Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

said1745

The Christian Scholastics... might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter (Gen. i; Is. lxvi).

— Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

said1745

We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling which the philosophers of all centuries have found in this same substance.

— Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

said1745

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?

— Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

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