Lametrie

Lametrie, JULIEN OFFRAY DE, French philosopher, born at St Malo on Christmas-day 1709, studied first for the church, but subsequently went over to medicine, and was trained by Boerhaave at Leyden. He entered the French army as surgeon in 1742; but the publication in 1745 of a thorough-going materialistic work, L'Histoire Naturelle de l'Âme, traduite de l'Anglais de Sharp (a fictitious name), roused such a feeling of odium against him that he was compelled to seek refuge in Leyden (1746). The work was of course Lametrie's own. But in Leyden the fear of persecution still dogged his footsteps: he published L'Homme Machine (1748), and was glad to escape a threatened arrest by accepting an invitation from Frederick the Great of Prussia to settle in Berlin. In Germany Lametrie continued his materialistic studies in L'Homme Plante (1748), L'Art de Jouir (1751), La Volupté, and other works. A good deal of the enmity excited against him was occasioned by cynical and satirical books which he published against the medical men, including such great authorities as Boerhaave, Linnæus, Astruc, Winslow, &c. Lametrie died at Berlin on 11th November 1751. Frederick himself wrote a memoir, which he caused to be prefixed to the philosophical works of Lametrie (2 vols. 1774). The best account of Lametrie is in Lange's History of Materialism (1878-81). See also the study by Quépat (Paris, 1873), and that by Du Bois-Reymond (Berlin, 1875).