"It must thus be known that the machines of nature have an infinite number of organs, and are so well apportioned and resistant to all accidents that it is impossible to destroy them. A natural machine remains a machine in its least parts, and what is more, it remains that same machine that it always was, being merely transformed by the different folds that it receives, now extended, now contracted, and as concentrated when it is thought to be lost." (Michel Fichant, "Système nouveau", 1695)
"Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence." (David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", 1779)
"The moral universe is so closely linked to the physical universe that it is scarcely likely that they are not one and the same machine." (Denis Diderot, "Eléments de Physiologie", 1875)
"Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism." (Claude Bernard, "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine", 1865)
“The history of civilization proves beyond doubt just how sterile the repeated attempts of metaphysics to guess at nature’s laws have been. Instead, there is every reason to believe that when the human intellect ignores reality and concentrates within, it can no longer explain the simplest inner workings of life’s machinery or of the world around us.” (Santiago Ramón y Cajal, "Reglas y Consejos sobre Investigacíon Cientifica: Los tónicos de la voluntad", 1897)
"The stream of human knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm." (Sir James Jeans, "The Mysterious Universe", 1930)
"Thanks to the psycho-physical reversibility, we can materialize the act of creation. Undoubtedly, the inventive machine has not yet been created, but we can see its creation soon." (Stefan Odobleja, "Consonant Psychology", 1938)
"In any case there is an intense modern interest in machines that imitate life. The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior." (William G Walter," An imitation of life", 1950)
"Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)
"We are always looking for metaphors in which to express our ideas of life, for our language is inadequate for all its complexities. Life is a labyrinth.[...] Life is a machine.[...] Life is a laboratory.[...] It is but a metaphor. When we speak of ultimate things we can, maybe, speak only in metaphors. Life is a dance, a very elaborate and complex dance [...]." (Charles Singer, "A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900", 1959)
"The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men." (Jorge L Borges, "Dreamtigers", 1960)
"The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine that forms a thin dynamic layer on the earth’s surface, and every human activity depends on the integrity and the proper functioning of this machine. Without the photosynthetic activity of green plants, there would be no oxygen for our engines, smelters, and furnaces, let alone support for human and animal life. Without the action of the plants, animals, and microorganisms that live in them, we could have no pure water in our lakes and rivers. Without the biological processes that have gone on in the soil for thousands of years, we could have neither food crops, oil, nor coal. This machine is our biological capital, the basic apparatus on which our total productivity depends. If we destroy it, our most advanced technology will become useless and any economic and political system that depends on it will founder. The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe." (Barry Commoner, "The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology", 1971)
"[…] nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening." (John A Wheeler & Wojciech H Zurek, "Quantum Theory and Measurement", 1983)
"Life, a watery, carbon-based macromolecular system, is reproducing autopoeisis. The autopoetic view of life is circular. Life is a metabolic machine which not only reproduces but fi ercely stores and uses information in order to resist breaking down." (Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, "Microcosmos", 1986)
"We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism." (Paul Ormerod, "The Death of Economics", 1994)
"Our mental model of the way the world works must shift from images of a clockwork, machinelike universe that is fixed and determined, to the model of a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities." (Joseph Jaworski, "Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership", 1996)
"On balance, the cartesian metaphor of organism as machine has proved to be a good idea. Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way." (Robert Rosen)
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