Machine vs. Nature, and How Those Views

¶ … machine vs. nature, and how those views differ in the present from that time period, comparing it to the book "Man a Machine" by Julien Offray de la Mettrie. MACHINE vs. NATURE There are as many different minds, different characters, and different customs, as there are different temperaments" La Mettrie et al. 90). This alone is enough to show that La Mettrie does not believe man is entirely a machine, even though he calls him one throughout this book.

Man is more complicated than a machine, because he can reason, and he can make decisions, which a simple machine cannot do. In the early Industrial revolution, during the 19th century, machines took over many jobs from men, including milling, weaving, spinning, and many other manufacturing jobs. Man saw these machines as marvels that created more products quickly and more effectively. They put many people out of work, but they also created new, low-paying jobs in factories. These machines literally changed the way people lived.

While society had been mostly agricultural before the Industrial Revolution, now more people moved to the cities, where jobs were plentiful. Society changed, and had continued to change as man makes improved machines. "The industrial rise of Britain spurred west European and American businesses. There were profits to be made and industries to defend lest British exports overwhelm the entire manufacturing base" Stearns 43).

As man learned more about machinery, he saw himself less and less as a machine, and more as a master of machines, one who could harness their energy, and put them to work for his own desires. Computers are an excellent example of this. Man created machines that can think, do millions of calculations a second, and remember what we tell them. There are even computers that can think and make decisions based on their memory and experience.

However, they can never make decisions based on their own thoughts and emotions, that is why they will always be machines, and we will still be the masters. Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it. For this reason, all the investigations have been vain, which the greatest philosophers have made a priori, that is to say, in so far as they use, as it were, the wings of the spirit.

Thus it is only a posteriori or by trying to disentangle the soul from the organs of the body, so to speak, that one can reach the highest probability concerning man's own nature, even though one can not discover with certainty what his nature is" (La Mettrie et al. 89). La Mettrie based his views on his own "observations," not on scientific study. Today, his "findings" seem sadly out of date, and a bit too romanticized.

"Winston Churchill once said that 'the further back you look, the further ahead in the future you can see'" (Moore and Simon 76), and this is surely the case with Le Mettrie's writings. The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement. Nourishment keeps up the movements which fever excites" La Mettrie et.