 In contrast, another strategy is to construe “soul” in functional terms, as not conflicting in any way with a basic materialist ontology, if it is not a substance of its own. Thus the materialist could be less overtly confrontational towards the concept of soul. For instance, because it has been naturalised, the soul can be treated, as La Mettrie suggests, as “but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain” (La Mettrie 1987, vol. I: 105). Here, as in Diderot, the status of the soul is displaced away from metaphysics towards the particular physiological site of the brain. Diderot’s Eléments de physiologie, as well as his supplementary remarks in the article “Âme”, stress both the complexity of the brain for any reductionist materialist project, and the “displacement” of the soul therein. The concept of the body which is at work in these materialist texts is, if not “ensouled”, certainly animated and vitalised, as in this remark of Diderot’s: