Note 24 — LA METTRIE’S RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS AND TO HIS SUCCESSORS.

Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” was published in 1690, and La Mettrie, like most cultured Frenchmen of the Enlightenment, was influenced by his teaching. The main agreement between Locke and La Mettrie is in their doctrine that all ideas are derived from sensation. Both vigorously oppose the belief in innate ideas,24 teaching that even our most complex and our most abstract ideas are gained through sensation. But La Mettrie does not follow Locke in analyzing these ideas and in concluding that many sensible qualities of objects—such as colors, sounds, etc.—have no existence outside the mind.25 He rejects Locke’s doctrine of spiritual substances,26 and opposes Locke’s theistic teaching, laying stress, on the other hand, upon Locke’s admission of the possibility that “thinking being may also be material.”27