LAMETTRIE, JULIEN OFFRAY DE French physician and philosopher, was born at St. Malo on Dec.
25, 1709. After studying theology in the Jansenist schools for some years, he went (1733) to Leyden to study under Boer haave, and in 1742 returned to Paris, where he obtained the ap pointment of surgeon to the guards. During an attack of fever he made observations on himself with reference to the action of quickened circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that physical phenomena were to be ac counted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. This conclusion he worked out in his earliest philosophical work, the Histoire naturelle de fame (c. The outcry caused by its publication drove Lamettrie back to Leyden, where he developed his doctrines still more boldly and completely, and with great originality, in L'Homme machine (Eng. trans., 175o; ed. with introd. and notes, J. Assezat, 1865), and L'Homme plante, treatises based upon principles of the most con sistently materialistic character. The ethics of these principles were worked out in Discours sur le bonheur, La Volupte, and L'Art de jouir, in which the end of life is found in the pleasures of the senses, and virtue is reduced to self-love. Atheism is the only means of ensuring the happiness of the world, which has been rendered impossible by the wars brought about by theologians.
The soul is only the thinking part of the body, and with the body it passes away. When death comes, the farce is over (la farce est jouee), therefore let us take our pleasure while we can. Lamettrie has been called "the Aristippus of modern materialism." In 1748 he was compelled to leave Holland for Berlin, where Frederick the Great appointed him court reader. He died on Nov. II, 1751. His collected Oeuvres philosophiques appeared after his death in several editions, published in London, Berlin and Amsterdam, respectively.
The chief authority for his life is the Eloge written by Frederick the Great (printed in Assezat's ed. of Homme machine). See F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (Eng. trans. by E. C. Thomas, ii. 188o) ; Neree Quepat (i.e., Rene Paquet), Lamettrie, sa vie et ses oeuvres (1873, with complete history of his works) ; J. E. Poritzky, J. 0. de Lamettrie, sein Leben und seine Werke (1900) ; F. Picavet, "Lamettrie et la critique allemande," in Compte rendu des seances de l'Acad. des Sciences morales et politiques, xxxii. (1889), a reply to German rehabilitations of Lamettrie.