Note 6 — NOTES.1
Gertrude Carman Bussey translation
“Man is ... a machine.” This is the first clear statement of this theory, which as the title of the work indicates, is the central doctrine of this work. Descartes had strongly denied the possibility of conceiving man as a machine. “We may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs,... but not that it should emit them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do.”10