Tools which served no practical purpose, and were used only for the demonstration of theoretical principles (a typical example was the inclined plane that Galileo built in order to illustrate the laws of motion).
In the 18th century, furthermore, machines appeared that were even more useless and bizzarre, like Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck (that flapped its wings, quacked, ate and expelled artificial faeces) or the writer of Pierre Jacquet-Droz, an automaton that could dip his pen into an inkwell, shake off the ink and write Descartes’ phrase Cogito ergo sum (Figure 1-1).
These machines were apparently built for amusement, and could easily be mistaken for mere toys, but in reality they were the equivalent of our Artificial Intelligence computers. Machines that were announcing the new philosophy with the disarming tools of utopia.

The chemical machine

The mechanical concept of nature spread very quickly in 17th century Europe, but not without contrasts. Opposition came from virtually all quarters, and it was violent. A part from the granted rejection by aristotelian academics, there was a new science that was slowly emerging from the night of alchemy and regarded the human body essentially as a seat of chemical reactions. The heirs of the alchemists were determined to leave magic behind, but had no intention of accepting the “mechanical” view of nature, and one of chemistry’s founding fathers, Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1731), launched an open challenge to mechanism. His thesis was that organisms cannot be machines because they possess a vis vitalis that does not exist in the mineral world. Stahl was the first to make a clear distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry, and challenged mechanism with three arguments:
(1) It will never be possible to obtain a synthesis of organic compounds in the laboratory because inorganic materials are devoid of vis vitalis.
(2) What is taking place inside living organisms are real transmutations of substances and not movements of wheels, belts and pulleys.