The Story of the Living Machine

That the living body is a machine is a statement that is frequently made without any very accurate idea as to what it means. On the one hand it is made with a belief that a strict comparison can be made between the body and an ordinary, artificial machine, and that living beings are thus reduced to simple mechanisms; on the other hand it is made loosely, without any special thought as to its significance, and certainly with no conception that it reduces life to a mechanism. The conclusion that the living body is a machine, involving as it does a mechanical conception of life, is one of most extreme philosophical importance, and no one interested in the philosophical conception of nature can fail to have an interest in this problem of the strict accuracy of the statement that the body is a machine.