Date: 1664
"I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"Indeed, one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water which drives them, the heart with the source of the ...
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"And finally, when a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain-keeper who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain's pipes return if he wants to produce, or prevent, or change their movements in some way."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"Now I maintain that when God unites a rational soul to this machine (in a way that I intend to explain later) he will place its principal seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to th...
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"You can think of our machine's heart and arteries, which push the animal spirits into the cavities of its brain, as being like the bellows of an organ, which push air into the wind-chests; and you can think of external objects, which stimulate certain nerves and cause spirits contained in the ca...
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1664
"I should like you to consider, after this, all the functions I have ascribed to this machine -- such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, so...
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1667
"For, though Man's Soul, and Body are not onely one natural Engine (as some have thought) of whose motions of all sorts, there may be as certain an accompt given, as those of a Watch or a Clock"
preview | full record— Sprat, Thomas (bap. 1635, d. 1713)
Date: 1678, 2nd edition in 1743
"But as for that prodigious paradox of Atheists, that cogitation itself is nothing but local motion or mechanism, we could not have thought it possible, that ever any many should have given entertainment to such a conceit, but that this was rather a meer slander raised upon Atheists."
preview | full record— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)
Date: 1686, 1689, 1697
"Let us but consider a little the Receptacles of Images, the Regions of Imagination, the curious formation in all the Instruments of Sense; to which we may add the activity and subtlety of the Spirits, the delicate Contexture of the Nerves, the various Articulations of the Voice, the Harmony of F...
preview | full record— Nourse, Timothy (c.1636–1699)