It is hard to believe that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is not a phenomenon of the twentieth century. For over three hundred years, the boundaries between bodies and machines - the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate - have been passionately explored. These explorations, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth and increasing during the nineteenth century, have been all but forgotten, lost beneath the commotion of the modern day world. This book retrieves these lost histories, giving voice to the hopes, dreams, and fears of philosophers, medical...