The defecating duck, or, the ambiguous origins of artificial life

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 599-633

  Riskin, Jessica ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 3042740259     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/377722     Document Type: Review

References (122)

1. Jacques Vaucanson, "Letter to the Abbé Desfontaines" (1742 [1738]), Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, trans. J. T. Desaguliers (Buren, The Netherlands, 1979), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated "L." This edition of Vaucanson's treatise includes both the original French version and Desaguliers's English translation. For the sake of consistency, all page numbers refer to the English translation.
2. Rodney A. Brooks, "Elephants Don't Play Chess," Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 9.
3. See André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mécanicien de génie (Paris, 1966), pp. 33, 61; hereafter abbreviated JV.
4. Voltaire, "Discours en vers sur l'homme" (1738), Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols. (Paris, 1877), 9:420.
5. For Frederick the Great's invitation, see Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, "Éloge de Vaucanson" (1782), Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O'Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris, 1847), 2:650-51; hereafter abbreviated "EV"
6. [Louis Petit de Bachaumont], Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des Lettres en France, depuis 1762 jusqu'à nos jours, ou journal d'un observateur, 36 vols. (London, 1777-89), 23:307. On Vaucanson's project to simulate the circulation of the blood, see also Riskin, "Eightenth-Century Wetware."
7. On ancient automata, see Alfred Chapuis and Édouard Gélis, Le Monde des automates: Étude historique et technique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, chaps. 1-4;
8. Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technical Study, trans. Alec Reid (New York, 1958), chaps. 1-2;
9. and Derek de Solla Price, "Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy," Technology and Culture 5 (Winter 1964): 9-23.
10. See Abbé Desfontaines, "Lettre CLXXX sur le flûteur automate et l'aristipe moderne," 30 Mar. 1738, Observations sur les écrits moderne, 34 vols. (Paris, 1735-43), 12:340.
11. The review of Vaucanson's treatise on the Flute-player in the Journal des sçavans also emphasized the role of anatomical and physical research in informing the android's design. See "Le Mechanisme du fluteur automate," Journal des sçavans (Apr. 1739): 441.
12. See Isaac de Caus, Nouvelle invention de lever l'eau plus hault que sa source avec quelques machines mouvantes par le moyen de l'eau, et un discours de la conduit d'icelle (London, 1644), p. 25 and plate 13.
13. See "Diverses machines inventées par M. Maillard: Cygne artificiel," in Machines et inventions approuvées par l'Académie Royale des Sciences depuis son établissement jusqu'à present; avec leur description, ed. M. Gallon, 7 vols. (Paris, 1735-77), 1:133-35.
14. I have found one possible exception to the general rule that automaton makers before Vaucanson did not try to reproduce living processes. This is a "statue" designed in the 1670s by a Württemburg physician named Reyselius. According to reports, this artificial man demonstrated circulation, digestion, and respiration with great "resemblance to man in all the internal parts" ("Le Mechanisme du fluteur automate," Journal des savants [1677]: 352).
15. On the artificial man of Reyselius, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, N.J., 1995), p. 182, and JV, pp. 117-18, 162-63. For a fuller discussion of the shift from representative to simulative automata, see Riskin, "Eighteenth-Century Wetware."
16. The term is from Laurens Laudan, "The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought, 1650-1665," Annals of Science 22 (June 1966): 73-104.
17. See Charles Perregaux and F.-Louis Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot (Neuchatel, 1916), pp. 31-34.
18. On the advent of the pinned cylinder in the late sixteenth century, see Sylvio A. Bedini, "The Role of Automata in the History of Technology," Technology and Culture 5 (Winter 1964): 35
19. and Maurice Daumas, "Industrial Mechanization," in A History of Technology and Invention: Progress through the Ages, trans. Eileen Hennessy, ed. Daumas, 3 vols. (1962-68; New York, 1969-79), 3:178-79.
20. On the continuity in automata technology before electronics, see Reed Benhamou, "From Curiosité to Utilité: The Automaton in Eighteenth-Century France," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 95.
21. I intend the word simulation in its modern sense, which originated around the middle of the twentieth century, to mean an experimental model from which one can discover properties of the natural subject. Simulation in its eighteenth-century usage meant "artifice" and had a negative connotation, implying fakery. (I am grateful to Evelyn Fox Keller for pressing me to clarify my use of the term.) I have not found eighteenth-century uses of simulation in reference to automata. I employ it here despite the anachronism because it describes Vaucanson's and his contemporaries' newly experimental approach to automata and in order to suggest that their work had a pivotal place in the history of attempts to simulate (in its modern sense) life processes. For an analysis of the meaning and implications of simulation and an argument that the project of simulating life originated in the mid-eighteenth century, see Riskin, "Eighteenth-Century Wetware." For arguments that Vaucanson's automata were simulative in the modern sense, see Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée du biomécanisme et de la mécanique comparée," Dialectica 10 (1956): 292-335;
22. Georges Canguilhem, "The Role of Analogies and Models in Biological Discovery," trans. Mrs. J. A. Z. Gardiner and Mrs. G. Kitchin, in Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social, and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. A. C. Crombie (New York, 1961), pp. 510-12;
23. Price, "Automata and the Origins of the Mechanistic Philosophy";
24. and David M. Fryer and John C. Marshall, "The Motives of Jacques Vaucanson," Technology and Culture 20 (Jan. 1979): 257-69.
25. See "EV," 2:655; Eliane Maingot, Les Automates (Paris, 1959), p. 18; JV, pp. 118-19;
26. and Linda Marlene Strauss, "Automata: A Study in the Interface of Science, Technology, and Popular Culture" (Ph. D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1987), pp. 71-72.
27. For Vaucanson's introduction of the phrase "moving anatomy" ("anatomie mouvante") to describe mechanical physiological models, see JV, p. 110; see also pp. 18, 34.
28. On eighteenth-century automaton designers' interest in lifelike materials and textures, see Riskin, "Eighteenth-Century Wetware."
29. See Chapuis and Gélis, Le Monde des automates, 2:149-51
30. and Chapuis and Droz, Automata, pp. 233-42.
31. See Friedrich Nicolai, Chronique à travers l'Allemagne et la Suisse, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1783), 1:284. The magician and automaton maker Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin claimed to have made the same discovery in 1845, while repairing the Duck's mechanism.
32. See Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (1858; New York, 1964), pp. 104-7.
33. On the Duck's fraudulence in general and its discovery, see JV, pp. 125-29
34. and Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 193-94.
35. See "L," and Godefroy-Christophe Bereis, letter dated 2 Nov. 1785, quoted in Chapuis and Droz, Automata, p. 234; see also pp. 233-38 and n. 14.
36. See for example Strauss, "Reflections in a Mechanical Mirror: Automata as Doubles and as Tools," Knowledge and Society 10 (1996): 179-207, in which the author ascribes to automata "the complex cultural role of doubles or doppelgängers" (p. 183).
37. Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London, 2002), p. xvi.
38. Daniel Cottom, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion," Representations, no. 66 (Spring 1999): 71.
39. For a third example, see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley, 2000), chaps. 2-3.
40. On the role of mechanism in seventeenth-century physiology, and on the development and influence of René Descartes's physiology in particular, see Theodore M. Brown, "Physiology and the Mechanical Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977): 25-54;
41. Peter Dear, "A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism," in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Stephen Shapin and Christopher Lawrence (Chicago, 1998), pp. 51-82;
42. François Duchesneau, Les Modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris, 1998), chaps. 2-3;
43. Julian Jaynes, "The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (Apr.-Jun. 1970): 219-34;
44. and Phillip R. Sloan, "Descartes, the Sceptics, and the Rejection of Vitalism in Seventeenth-Century Physiology" Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 8 (1977): 1-28.
45. The rejection of classical mechanism in nineteenth-century life sciences has been treated mostly in the context of German romanticism and Naturphilosophie. See for example Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982) and "Morphotypes and the Historical-Genetic Method in Romantic Biology"
46. and L. S. Jacyna, "Romantic Thought and the Origins of Cell Theory," in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 119-29, 161-68;
47. Jardine, "Naturphilosophie and the Kingdoms of Nature," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230-45;
48. and Myles W. Jackson, "The State and Nature of Unity and Freedom: German Romantic Biology and Ethics," in Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, ed. Jane Maienschein and Michael Ruse (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 98-112.
49. On late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century departures from the mechanist explanation of living processes outside Germany, see Evelleen Richards, "'Metaphorical Mystifications': The Romantic Gestation of Nature in British Biology" and Philip F. Rehbock, "Transcendental Anatomy," in Romanticism and the Sciences, pp. 130-43, 144-60;
50. Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1994);
51. and Robert J. Richards, "Darwin's Romantic Biology: The Foundation of His Evolutionary Ethics," in Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, pp. 113-53.
52. I treat the mid-eighteenth-century turn against philosophical mechanism, and its underlying uncertainties and ambivalences, in Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chap. 3.
53. Examples follow. But one sort of cultural development that figured centrally in the changing fortunes of artificial life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not directly treated here: the shifting tides of secularism and religiosity. An example of the changing role of religion in the history of artificial life is that religious objections to simulating life arose, as far as I have been able to tell, only in the early part of the nineteenth century and were conspicuously absent from the conversation during the preceding period. I mean to treat this aspect of the story in the larger project from which this essay is drawn. On religious attitudes toward "animating the inanimate," see Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 50.
54. For a presentation of the magical and wondrous elements of early modern automata, see Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, 2001), esp. pp. 35-47 and 266-74.
55. See Vaucanson, "An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing the German Flute" (1742), Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, pp. 10-20.
56. Jean d'Alembert, "Androïde" (1751), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and d'Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751-72), 1:448.
57. "One can substitute another flute entirely in the place of the one he plays" (Charles Philippe d'Albert, duc de Luynes, Mémoires du Duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV, 3 vols. [Paris, 1860], 2:12-13). Similarly, the Abbé Desfontaines emphasized that it was "the fingers positioned variously on the holes of the flute that vary the tones.... In a word art has done here all that nature does in those who play the flute well. That is what can be seen and heard, beyond a doubt" (Desfontaines, "Lettre CLXXX sur le flûteur automate et l'aristipe moderne," quoted in JV, p. 50).
58. Alexander Buchner, Mechanical Musical Instruments, trans. Iris Urwin (London, n.d.), pp. 85-86;
59. and David Lasocki, preface to Vaucanson, Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, p. [ii].
60. See Vaucanson, "An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing the German Flute," pp. 19-20.
61. This process was the ancestor of the procedure by which the first musical recordings were made, during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when pianists such as Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Gershwin, Arthur Rubinstein, and Scott Joplin marked out rolls for player-pianos. See Larry Givens, Re-enacting the Artist: A Story of the Ampico Reproducing Piano (New York, 1970).
62. See Vaucanson, Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate; JV, pp. 70-72, 76-80; and Registre des procès-verbaux des séances for 26 Apr. 1739 and 30 Apr. 1739, Archives de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris.
63. Vaucanson, "An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing the German Flute," p. 10.
64. This was in fact in conflict with the recommendations of some contemporary published flute tutors. Johann Quantz, in particular, denied that pitch was controlled by blowing-pressure. See Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen (Berlin, 1752), chap. 4. There was much disagreement even about flute players' actual practice. See Lasocki, preface, pp. [v-ix].
65. Hermann von Helmholtz explained the effects of partials in his Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig, 1863). I am grateful to Myles Jackson for helping me to figure out the causes underlying Vaucanson's acoustical discovery.
66. "The Academy voted that henceforth it will not receive nor examine any paper concerned with squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, duplicating the cube, and perpetual motion, and that this decision will be made public" (quoted in Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 [Berkeley, 1971], p. 145).
67. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (1748; Indianapolis, 1994), p. 69.
68. See Wolfgang von Kempelen, "De la machine parlante," Le Mécanisme de la parole suivi de la description d'une machine parlante (Vienna, 1791), pp. 394-464; hereafter abbreviated "MP."
69. On Kempelen's and others' attempts to simulate human speech in the last third of the eighteenth century, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, chap. 8, and Riskin, "Eighteenth- Century Wetware."
70. Karl Gottlieb von Windisch, Inanimate Reason: or a Circumstantial Account of that Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, M. de Kempelen's Chess-Player (London, 1784), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated IR.
71. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Herzog Carl August, 12 June 1797, quoted in Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, p. 196.
72. Several years later, Goethe saw Vaucanson's three automata in Helmstädt and reported that they were "utterly paralyzed," the Flute-player had fallen "mute," and the Duck "still devoured his oats briskly enough, but had lost its powers of digestion" (Goethe, Annals, or Day and Year Papers 1749-1822, trans. and ed. Charles Nisbet [1805; New York, 1901], p. 113).
73. On Kempelen's chess-playing Turk, see Charles Michael Carroll, The Great Chess Automaton (New York, 1975);
74. Simon Schaffer, "Babbage's Dancer and the Impresarios of Mechanism," in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London, 1996), pp. 65-75
75. and "Enlightened Automata," in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinksi, and Schaffer (Chicago, 1999), pp. 154-64;
76. and Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York, 2002).
77. See [George Walker], "Anatomy of the Chess Automaton," Fraser's Magazine 19 (June 1839): 725;
78. Schaffer, "Enlightened Automata," p. 162;
79. Aleck Abrahams, "Dr. Kempelen's Automaton Chess-player," Notes and Queries, 8 Apr. 1922, pp. 155-56;
80. and Henry Ridgely Evans, Edgar Allan Poe and Baron von Kempelen's Chess-Playing Automaton (Kenton, Ohio, 1939), p. 14.
81. A Knight's Tour entails moving a knight, starting on any square and using the rule governing the knights' moves, to all the other squares in succession without touching any square twice. See IR, pp. 23-24
82. and Observations on the Automaton Chess Player, Now Exhibited in London, at 4, Spring Gardens (London, 1819), p. 24.
83. and Carroll, The Great Chess Automaton.
84. For prominent debunkings of the Turk, see Robert Willis, An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. de Kempelen (London, 1821)
85. and Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess-Player," "Eureka," and Miscellanies, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry 10 vols. (New York, 1914), 9:173-212.
86. The History and Analysis of the Supposed Automaton Chess Player of M. de Kempelen, Now Exhibiting in This Country by Mr. Maelzel (Boston, 1826), p. 5.
87. See also IR, p. 10.
88. See Abrahams, "Dr. Kempelen's Automaton Chess-player," p. 155
89. Observations on the Automaton Chess Player, Now Exhibited in London, at 4, Spring Gardens, pp. 30, 32.
90. Poe, "Maelzel's Chess-Player," pp. 176, 177.
91. On Poe and the chess-playing Turk, see Evans, Edgar Allan Poe and Baron von Kempelen's Chess-Playing Automaton.
92. The MIT engineer Norbert Wiener played the leading role in formulating the concept of feedback. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, 1948).
93. For other early discussions of machines as information processors capable, like animals, of interacting with their environments, see W. Grey Walter, "An Imitation of Life," Scientific American 182 (May 1950): 42-45
94. and The Living Brain (New York, 1953), chaps. 5 and 7
95. and Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, 1970).
96. See, for example, Katie Hafner, "In an Ancient Game, Computing's Future," New York Times, 1 Aug. 2002, p. 5.
97. For an argument that "before thinking of automating manual labor, one must conceive of mechanically representing the limbs of man," see Jean-Claude Beaune, L'Automate et ses mobiles (Paris, 1980), p. 257.
98. Beaune takes Vaucanson's career as his central case. He returns to this trajectory from automata to industrial automation, simulation to replacement, in "The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century," trans. Ian Patterson, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, 3 vols. (New York, 1989), 1:431-80. It seems to me however, and I have been arguing here, that the epistemological, technological, and economic aspects of simulation shaped one another - rather than the epistemological preceding the technical that in turn preceded the economic. These elements were all inextricably present in the very constitution of the question of what was essential to life or of what constituted intelligent behavior.
99. See Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, N. J., 1980), p. 416.
100. On Vaucanson's moving anatomies, see JV, pp. no, 18, 34, and chap. 5, and "EV," 2:655.
101. For other examples of moving anatomies, see François Quesnay Essai phisique sur l'oeconomie animale (Paris, 1736), pp. 219-23
102. and Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée du biomécanisme et de la mécanique comparée," pp. 298-99.
103. On the Jaquet-Droz family's prostheses, see Charles Perregaux and F.-Louis Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot (Neuchatel, 1916), pp. 31-36, 89-91, 100-111, 140;
104. A recent installation by the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye makes manifest the current willingness to separate functional from mimetic simulation. Cloaca, Delvoye's digesting and defecating machine, looks like a laboratory bench, with a system of tubes and pumps leading through a series of six transparent vats containing enzymes, bacteria, acids, and bases. See Wim Delvoye, Cloaca (Ghent, 2000) and Cloaca, New and Improved (New York, 2001). Despite the fact that his machine is a purely functional simulation, Delvoye insists that its purpose is solely artistic and in no way experimental. Thus functional simulations have, in the early twenty-first century, assumed the role that clockwork amusements such as de Caus's birds, which reproduced only external behavior and not inner function, played during the seventeenth. At that time, the simulation of inner function did not yet command philosophical interest, and automaton makers confined their efforts to reproducing animals' outward behaviors for artistic purposes. Now, the simulation of inner function is familiar enough that, except in the context of mental processes, its philosophical interest has waned. Perhaps for this reason functional simulations can become purely artistic projects the way clockwork amusements once were. In between, however, automaton makers and commentators were keenly interested in the relations between outward appearance and inner function; thus their efforts to reproduce each were as inseparable as were the artistic, technological, and philosophical components of their work.
105. Almut Bohnsack, Der Jacquard-Webstuhl (Munich, 1993), pp. 27-28;
106. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Jacques Vaucanson (exhibition catalogue, Musée National des Techniques, Paris, 1983), p. 16;
107. and Garanger, "Industrial Mechanization," pp. 179-81.
108. "Encore sous l'impression profonde des événements de Lyon, il va montrer, et avec quel brio, qu'il est possible de se passer d'un grand nombre d'ouvriers pour actionner les métiers des canuts lyonnais" (JV, p. 208).
109. For Taylor's application of the distinction between intelligent and unintelligent work, see Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911), chap. 2.
110. See "Artisan" and "Artiste," in Encyclopédie, 1:745.
111. See also William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 23.
112. See Lorraine Daston, "Enlightenment Calculations," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 182-202.
113. See Blaise Pascal, "Lettre dédicatoire à Monseigneur le Chancelier sur le sujet de la machine nouvellement inventée par le sieur B.P. pour faire toutes sortes d'opérations d'arithmétique par un mouvement réglé sans plume ni jetons, avec un avis nécessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir ladite machine et s'en servir" (1645), trans. L. Leland Locke, in A Source Book in Mathematics, ed. David Eugene Smith (1929; New York, 1959), p. 169.
114. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multiplicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur" (1685), trans. Mark Kormes, in A Source Book in Mathematics, p. 181.
115. Charles Babbage, The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1822), The Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Martin Campbell-Kelly, 10 vols. (London, 1989), 8:136, 137.
116. See Daston, "Enlightenment Calculations," and Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York, 1996), chap. 1.
117. The tables were computed by the method of differences, the relevant theorem being that for a polynomial of degree n, the nth difference is a constant. On Babbage's notions of human and machine intelligence and mental labor, see also Schaffer, "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 203-27
118. "Babbage's Dancer," and "OK Computer," in Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns, ed. Michael Hagner (Göttingen, 1999).
119. and Comité des Fêtes du 250e anniversaire de la naissance de Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721-1790), Les Oeuvres des Jaquet-Droz, Montres, Pendules, et Automates (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1971).
120. "If what thinks in my brain is not a part of that vital organ, and consequently of the whole body, why does my blood heat up when I am lying tranquilly in bed thinking.... Ask this of imaginative men, of great poets, of those who are ravished by a well-expressed sentiment, who are transported by an exquisite taste, by the charms of nature, truth, or virtue!" (La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, pp. 63-64).
121. J. A. Borgnis, Des machines imitatives et théatrales, vol. 8 of Traité complet de mécanique appliquée aux arts (Paris, 1820), p. 118.
122. Helmholtz, "On the Interaction of Natural Forces" (1854), trans. John Tyndall, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, trans. H. W. Eve et al. (1873; New York, 1895), pp. 137, 138.