Julien de La Mettrie
born
Dec. 25, 1709, Saint-Malo, Fr.
died Nov. 11, 1751, Berlin
French physician and philosopher whose
Materialistic interpretation of psychic
phenomena laid the groundwork for future
developments of behaviourism and played
an important part in the history of
modern Materialism.
La Mettrie obtained a medical degree at
Reims, studied medicine in Leiden under
Hermann Boerhaave (some of whose works
he translated into French), and served
as surgeon to the French military. A
personal illness convinced him that
psychic phenomena were directly related
to organic changes in the brain and
nervous system. The outcry following
publication of these views in Histoire
naturelle de l’âme (1745; “Natural
History of the Soul”) forced his
departure from Paris. The book was
burned by the public hangman. In Holland
La Mettrie published L’Homme-machine
(1747; L’Homme Machine: A Study in the
Origins of an Idea, 1960), developing
more boldly and completely, and with
great originality, his Materialistic and
atheistic views. The ethics of these
principles were worked out in Discours
sur le bonheur ou l’anti-Sénèque
(“Discourse on Happiness, or the
Anti-Seneca”). He was then forced to
leave Holland but was welcomed in Berlin
(1748) by Frederick the Great, made
court reader, and appointed to the
academy of science. In accord with his
belief that atheism was the sole road to
happiness and the pleasure of the senses
the purpose of life (Le Petit Homme à
longue queue, 1751; “The Small Man in a
Long Queue”), he was a carefree hedonist
to the end, finally dying of ptomaine
poisoning. His collected works, Oeuvres
philosophiques, were published in 1751,
and selections were edited by Marcelle
Tisserand in 1954.
